Last Lawman (9781101611456) (23 page)

Spurr took the plate. As she resumed eating, Spurr regarded her again curiously as he walked back around the fire and sat down against his saddle. She ate hunkered almost childlike over her plate, not looking at him and making no attempt to converse.

Touched. No doubt about it. Poor woman.

What in hell would he do with her?

“You’re still going after them—alone?” Mrs. Wilde asked Spurr later as she finished eating and set her plate aside, brushing her greasy hands across her sun-faded, dusty denims.

“I reckon I am at that,” Spurr said with a sigh.

“Are you a good tracker?”

“Few better. Maybe Kit Carson, but he’s dead.”

“Then I’m going with you.” She stared across the fire at him. Her face could have been made of granite, for all the emotion it displayed. No emotion, only hard resolve.

Spurr studied her as he ran his last bit of rabbit around in the last of the beans on his plate with his fork. “So that’s what all this is about—you being out here.”

She gave an expression as though he’d been crazy to question it. “Oh, I have to get my boy back. He’s probably terrified half to death. He’s all I have, you see. I’m all he has.”

Spurr stared across the glowing coals at her. “But I thought…”

He let his voice trail away, instinctively knowing that he should leave the thought unfinished. Maybe he was wrong in his assumptions; maybe the Vultures really did have her son. But…no, he was sure that the undertaker in Sweetwater had said they’d killed him and he was waiting to bury the child if and when his mother returned.

Spurr looked at her again, saw her sitting there near the fire, examining one of her moccasins. As preoccupied as a child. All at once, a great bubble of sorrow rose up from his belly, and he tried to swallow it down while tears came to his eyes. The sorrow lodged in his throat like a hard pine knot, and he quickly raised his cup to cover it.

He cleared his throat, sipped his coffee twice, tears streaming down his cheeks, and swirled the cup to busy himself.

The poor woman.

Her son murdered in front of her eyes, and the only way she could keep from unraveling entirely was to allow herself to believe the Vultures had him, and that she would get him back.

“You do the tracking,” she said suddenly, jolting him out of the incomprehensibly sad thoughts swirling through his head, against his will visiting the woman’s own suppressed suffering, “and I’ll do the cooking.”

She smiled, squeezing the toe of her left moccasin, trying to return some pliance to the old doeskin. “And I do apologize for stealing your rabbit, Marshal…”

“Spurr,” he said thickly.

“Marshal Spurr. That was shameful. I was just frightened. Amazing what fear can drive a person to do. Before tonight I’d never stolen so much as a sewing thimble!”

“You don’t need to fear me, Mrs. Wilde.”

“Please, do call me Erin.” Her eyes snapped wider. “My closest friends do. And I have a feeling, knowing now that I can trust you, and that you’re a thoroughly decent
man—having offered me food even after I stole from you—that we’re going to be friends.”

Spurr swiped a tear that had made its way through his beard to dangle off the end of his chin. “Don’t you think, Mrs. Wilde…that perhaps I should ride on alone after your boy? I mean, you’ve never done anything like this before, I’d wager.”

“Nonsense. Jim is going to need me there to comfort him when he’s rescued, and to take him on back to Sweetwater with me. I’m sure he’s terrified, but I’ve prayed to the lord our savior to keep him strong and to let Jim know that I’m here. Right behind him. And when I…er,
we
…get a chance, we’re going to swipe him away from those brigands, and he and I will return to Sweetwater, and I’ll fix my boy his favorite meal—fried chicken, creamed garden carrots, and milk gravy for his ’tatoes.”

The pine knot grew larger and harder in Spurr’s throat, but he managed to say, “I reckon he’ll be more than ready for that, ma’am.”

“Erin.”

“I mean, Erin.” Spurr added a splash of whiskey to his coffee, trying desperately to assuage the sorrow that was making him as sick as sour milk, his heart quivering, and frowned across the fire at her. “You saw what happened to the other lawmen, did you?”

“Yes, I’d stopped my horse along the creek,” she said plainly, pulling a sock onto her right, bare foot, grunting softly with the effort. “I heard the shooting and looked up to see the soldiers tumbling off their horses.”

Her eyes turned bright, and she smiled painfully as she drew the sock up to her calf, then grabbed the other one off the rock she’d draped it across. “I hope Jimmy didn’t see that. I think he was in one of the buildings, or maybe Miss Tate was caring for him somewhere a ways from the fort.” She sniffed and gazed across the fire at Spurr. “Surely
Stanhope’s men aren’t so callous as to allow a child to be privy to their depradations. They simply couldn’t be—could they, Marshal Spurr?”

He’d forgotten about the whore whom the Vultures had kidnapped in Willow City. The poor girl must still be in the Vultures’ talons, if she was still alive.

“Most likely, you’re right, Erin.”

He wondered why she thought the Vultures would have the boy, anyway. What worth could little Jim be to them? Of course, Spurr had no inclination to voice his question. The woman he was sharing his camp with had had her wits dulled by an overload of sorrow. He almost envied her.

And he hoped for her sake that she never got them back.

The next day, in the early afternoon, Magpie Quint stared through the field glasses he’d stolen from the soldiers he and the others had gunned down at the Elkhorn Creek outpost and said, “Well, I’ll be hanged!”

Clell Stanhope was on his knees beside a narrow but hard-running creek tumbling out of the stretch of low, wooded mountains they’d been riding through, holding his head under the water tumbling down from a beaver dam. He turned to Quint now, opening his eyes as the water continued to wash over him, soaking his beard and pasting his hair against his head. “Didn’t your ma say somethin’ like that?” the outlaw leader mocked. “Just after she done squeezed you out?”

The others, drinking or washing along the stream, chuckled.

“Just after she squeezed him out and tried to shove him down her privy—’cause he was so damn ugly!” Lester Stanhope added, tossing his wet head and laughing too loudly, lower jaw hanging nearly to his skinny chest.

The others stopped laughing and cast him dubious looks. The dull-witted brother of their leader was an embarrassment
to them all. They put up with the scrawnier, younger of the two Stanhopes for obvious reasons, though Clell himself often had to resist the temptation to drill a .44 ball through his younger sibling’s head.

And he would have, too, if he hadn’t promised their dear mother on her deathbed to look after the turnip, as god knew he wasn’t able to fend for himself. He could rape and kill just fine. It was the little things like securing food and lodging that he struggled with, just as their dear old pa had, as well.

Clell himself took after his mother—a Tennessee mountain woman tough as a hickory knot and meaner than a shoat with its tail dipped in tar.

Quint, perched on the steep side of a ridge about thirty feet up from the stream and its narrow canyon, glared down at Stanhope and the others. “All right, never mind,” he said with feigned indifference.

“Never mind what?” Stanhope said, pulling his head out of the falls.

Quint let the glasses dangle from the cord around his neck and began making his way down the steep ridge, his black coat blowing out around his long, black-clad legs. Not looking at the others, he adjusted his black, broad-brimmed hat as he stepped around the boulder, heading for the horses gathered between him and the other gang members. His faded red vest fairly glowed in the crisp light.

“Ah, come on, Magpie!” Clell said, wringing his hair out as he faced the man he considered his first lieutenant despite the man’s thin skin and generally pissy nature.

“No, that’s all right. You fellas would rather laugh and jeer and taunt like a bunch of six-year-olds than take anything serious.”

The other men looked around at each other, chuckling sheepishly.

“Magpie, for chrissakes!” Clell said, setting his hat on his wet head. “Don’t be that way. What’d you see?”

Magpie leapt from a low ledge to the bottom of the canyon, then walked over and deposited his field glasses in his saddlebags. The others watched him, waiting. Magpie didn’t look at them but appeared to be concentrating only on buckling his saddlebag flap.

Hector Debo slicked his short black hair down with his hand and set his sugarloaf sombrero on his head as he stepped out away from the river. “Come on, amigo—we apologize, huh? We were just havin’ a little fun.”

“Yeah, we was just havin’ a little fun,” added Lester Stanhope. “I was just kiddin’ about you bein’ ugly. Hell, you ain’t no uglier than Hector here.”

He laughed at that. But he was the only one. Debo gave him a half-tolerant look, then turned back to Magpie. He and Quint had been partners several years before they’d thrown in with Stanhope’s group during a raid up in Montana, so they were closer to each other than to the rest of the group.

“You fellas are too much, you’re just too much,” said Magpie. “I’m right tired of all your funnin’. Might just ride on alone—to hell with you.” He walked over and took his time untying his reins from a stunted cedar.

“Oh, for chrissakes!” Stanhope stomped on over to Magpie’s black-and-white pinto, unbuckled the saddlebag flap, and pulled out Magpie’s field glasses.

“Be careful with them, Clell,” Magpie said, his reins in his hand, his indignant look in place. “I took them myself—they’re mine. And I don’t want ’em gettin’ broken.”

“Ah, shut up, ya damn Nancy boy,” Stanhope said, pulling the glasses out of their case, dropping the case to the ground, and heading up the ridge. “Can’t take a damn bit of funnin’. Well, this group likes to have a good time, and if your skin’s too damn thin, I suggest you pull foot.” He stopped halfway up to where Magpie had been and turned an angry look back to the sore-headed Quint, who was sulkily leading his horse up along the trail skirting the creek.
“But don’t expect to be ridin’ off with any of that bank loot, by god. You quit this group, you quit your cut, too!”

“Yeah, that’s right, brother Clell,” Lester said. “You quit the group, you ain’t gettin’ your cut, Magpie!”

“Shut up, Lester!” Clell said with a weary air as he continued climbing the ridge. The elder Stanhope wasn’t worried about the big, black-and-red-clad killer leaving the group. Because of his thin skin, he often threatened to leave the group when his feelings were hurt, but they’d likely catch up to him farther up the trail, and all would be well with Magpie and the gang in no time.

A couple of the other riders—Red Ryan and Doc Plowright—climbed the ridge after Clell.

“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Clell said after he’d stared through Magpie’s binoculars. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Who do you think it is, Boss?” asked the tall, red-bearded Ryan, running a finger across the gold spike in his right ear.

In the two semicircles of magnified vision, Clell watched two horseback riders trot their mounts along the edge of the creek about a quarter mile east of the Vultures’ position. A man and a woman. At least, the second rider, riding behind the man, appeared a woman though she wore men’s shabby trail clothes and a man’s brown hat. But she was willowy, and she had two nice-sized lumps in her flannel shirt. And long brown hair bounced across her shoulders.

Stanhope had no idea who the woman was, but, as he adjusted the focus wheel on the army-issue field glasses, he brought up the grizzled, patch-bearded features of the man riding a big roan ahead of her, until the name Deputy U.S. Marshal Spurr Morgan fixed itself in the outlaw leader’s brain.

He smiled and said almost fondly, “Ole Spurr.”

“Say again, Boss,” said Red Ryan, standing next to Stanhope.

“You remember ole Spurr Morgan, don’t ya?”

“You mean we got that old mossyhorn doggin’ us
again
? Must be the third or fourth time.”

“Third,” said Clell, grinning as he handed the glasses to the big, burly redhead. “We must be one helluva thorn in that old lawdog’s side. Heard tell he was once—some say he still is—the best lawbringer in Henry Brackett’s remuda.”

“Ah, hell,” said Doc Plowright, scratching at a food stain on the wool vest he wore over a grimy red undershirt, a set of human teeth dangling from the twine hanging around his stout neck. “He’s older than the Rockies themselves!”

“Gotta remember,” said Ryan, staring through the field glasses, his brown teeth showing inside his beard, “he almost always rides solo—too ornery for a partner, they say—and he’s the only lawman that ever even came close to catchin’ up to us.” He poked his tongue through the gap between his two front teeth. “Wonder who the woman is. Can’t make her out from here.”

“Prob’ly some whore,” said Plowright. “He’s an old whoremongerer, Spurr is. Said he married up with a squaw once, long time ago, before the war.”

Clell said, “You know, fellas—maybe it’s time someone taught Spurr this is a young man’s country. Old mossyhorns like him just don’t have what it takes to survive out here. They’re like old bull buffs; only thing is, unlike the buffalo, they don’t have sense enough to just wander away and die.”