Last Lawman (9781101611456) (25 page)

Spurr cursed and looked down the slope. On the canyon floor, Erin Wilde’s steeldust was spinning in a flurry of rising dust. The woman was on the ground on the far side of the trail. As the horse swung around once more, mane flying, it pointed itself up trail, whinnied shrilly, and galloped off in the direction in which Spurr had sent Cochise.

When he’d climbed the ridge through a sloping trough, he’d left the woman in the canyon, hidden behind a bend in the northern wall. She must have gotten restless and ridden out into the canyon to see what had become of Spurr.

Well, now she knew, damnit.

Spurr bit his lower lip as she pushed up onto her elbows and peered up the slope through the still-wafting dust at Doc Plowright bearing down on her with his Winchester. Plowright triggered two more quick shots. The woman twisted around and lowered her head, shielding herself with an upraised arm, as two more bullets blew up dust and gravel within a foot of her.

“I got her dead to rights, Spurr!” Plowright shouted,
casting a quick glance up the slope at the lawman flanking him, as Doc savagely levered a fresh cartridge while ejecting the spent one. It clinked and rattled briefly on the scree.

He pressed his cheek up against the stock once more, steadying the rifle on the woman, who was now looking up over her arm.

Spurr chuffed in disgust. “Goddamnit.”

His old heart chugged as he slid his glance between Plowright and Erin Wilde. She stayed down on the trail, knowing that if she tried to run the gunman would kill her. Spurr measured his chances at drilling Plowright before Doc could kill the woman. The brigand seemed to read his mind, as he cast a cool glance toward the lawman and showed one eyetooth between his thin lips mantled by a brushy brown mustache.

“You kill her, I’ll kill you, Doc!” Spurr set his sights on the side of the rifleman’s head, just above his ear.

He wanted to take the shot. But there was a good chance that Plowright would trip his own trigger and drill a round through Erin. He didn’t know what else to do, however, so he tightened his trigger finger. The faint ching of a spur sounded behind him. His blood chilled, remembering Red Ryan.

A rifle cracked. For a quarter second, he thought he’d fired his own Winchester but then he felt the bullet burn along the side of his head, just over his right ear. The jar spun him around on his heel, and he whipped his rifle around to see the hatless Ryan staggering toward him, his rifle aimed out from his hip, blood smeared across his left temple.

He ground his teeth and lowered his cocking lever but before he could rack a shell, Spurr triggered his Winchester, knocking Ryan back against the boulder from which Spurr had first gotten the drop on him. Ryan screamed as he rammed the cocking lever up against the underside of his rifle and, screaming again, triggered the rifle down low,
blowing the toe off his left boot to reveal a bloody nub poking up out of his white sock.

That bullet blew up shale a foot in front of Spurr.

Down on his butt, Spurr raked out another frustrated curse, brushing his hand against the side of his head, and ignoring the blood on his glove, twisted around to gaze down slope. Plowright was running down the slope toward the canyon, howling like a crazed coyote. Erin lay where she’d fallen, propped on her elbows and looking dazed behind the screen of her mussed hair.

Spurr raised his rifle and fired while lying on his hip. Both shots were long, striking the canyon trail beyond Plowright. One came close enough to cause the outlaw to lose his footing on the scree; one of his boots slipped out from beneath him, and he hit the ground hard on his ass.

Spurr fired again too quickly. His bullet blew the hat off Plowright’s head. The outlaw left his rifle on the ground, palmed one of his pistols, and snapped a quick shot toward Spurr, the bullet twanging off scree to Spurr’s left.

Then Plowright heaved himself to his feet and set off running down canyon toward Erin. Spurr climbed to a knee and, ignoring the burn of the bullet across the side of his head, aimed toward the running cutthroat. He removed his finger from the Winchester’s trigger and raised the barrel. Plowright was in line now with Erin, and Spurr was liable to hit the woman with a ricochet.

He knelt there, staring in dread.

On the canyon floor, propped on her elbows, Erin watched the crazed desperado running toward her, howling. Near the foot of the slope, his boots slipped out from under him again, but he quickly regained his feet, dropped onto the trail running along the base of the ridge, and ran toward where Erin had been deposited by her horse.

He was the man whom she’d heard called Doc. He was
the one responsible for the cut over her left brow. He’d smacked her while he’d lain between her legs for no more reason than he’d wanted to inflict as much pain as possible.

Fifteen feet away, Plowright stopped suddenly, boots skidding in the dust, throwing his arms out for balance. He stared in shock down at Erin, recognizing her. He held his pistol negligently in his right hand.

“Well,” Plowright said, chuckling softly under his breath. “I’ll be damned.”

“You got that right, mister.”

Erin wrapped her right hand around the pistol wedged behind her belt, and slipped the gun out from behind her waistband. Plowright regained his shocked look and snapped his pistol toward her. Erin took her own revolver in both hands and steadied it. Plowright fired, his slug screeching past her ear and thumping loudly into the ground beside her. Erin centered her pistol’s sights on the man’s chest, but she must have nudged the gun high at the last quarter second.

At the same time that the pistol roared, nearly leaping out of her aching hands, Plowright twisted around, lower jaw hanging, blood blossoming from his left cheek as blood and white bits of teeth blew out the other cheek and onto the trail.

“Gnaahhh!”
the desperado cried. It was like a gargle, and it caused more blood to spew out onto the trail.

Erin bit her lower lip as she raked her revolver’s hammer back with both thumbs and steadied the gun on the outlaw. She fired just as Plowright gave a garbled curse and jerked toward Erin, and her bullet blew off his right earlobe before spanging off a rock a few feet up the canyon slope.

Plowright’s shot sailed far wide as he screamed again, twisted around, and dropped to one knee before lunging back to his feet and staggering off up the trail. He started howling again but not with victory; he was howling now like a dog with its ass peppered with buckshot.

Erin gained her feet, ignoring the ache in her twisted left
ankle, and stumbled forward, gritting her teeth, remembering the hard, taunting, sadistic look in the man’s eyes as he’d pounded against her. She thought of Jim—poor Jimmy, probably used as a slave by these cutthroats to gather wood and tend their horses.

The image of her poor son amongst these killers jerked an exasperated scream out of her throat, and she stopped suddenly about ten feet behind the stumbling Plowright and raised the revolver. She thumbed the hammer back. Doc must have heard the ratcheting click of Erin’s pistol because he stopped and turned half around, eyes widening when he saw the gun.

“No!”

His cry was punctuated by the revolver’s belch. The slug punched through his collarbone, sending him staggering back and dropping his chin to watch the blood oozing from his shoulder. He fell on his butt and lay flat on his back, shaking his bloody head and grinding his heels in the trail. He was no longer yelling, just whimpering and staring at the sky as though for help that wasn’t likely to come.

Meanwhile, Spurr had worked his way down the ridge. He walked over to where Erin stood a few feet from Plowright, holding the gun straight down in both hands, sobbing.

“Good,” Spurr said, placing a hand on her shoulder while gazing grimly down at Plowright. “You done real good, Erin.”

She looked at him, sniffed, then turned full toward him and frowned. She placed her hand hand against the side of his head. “Spurr…you’re…”

He took her hand in his, lowered it. “Cut myself worse shavin’.” He gave her a reassuring smile and then, spying movement in the willows along the creek, shoved her aside and raised his rifle, loudly racking a shell into the chamber.

“Come on out of there!”

His heart twisted and lurched. If the other Vultures were
part of Plowright and Red Ryan’s ambush, he and Erin had likely come to the end of their trail.

The willow branches bobbed and swayed around a broad, round face sheathed in a white beard streaked with gunmetal gray. Two eyes blinked beneath a leather hat brim.

“Why, I’ll be hanged!” the lurker said as he pushed up out of the brush, sort of stumbling toward Spurr and Erin, the mule ears of his high-topped boots buffeting. He was clad all in buckskins, with dyed porcupine quills adorning his big-front buckskin tunic. If he was one of the Vultures, he was one Spurr didn’t recognize—and one even older than Spurr himself. The graybeard said, “Should have known if there was gunwork around, ole Spurr Morgan wouldn’t be far behind!”

Spurr studied the oldster moving toward him, felt his jaws loosen. Slowly, absently depressing his rifle’s hammer and lowering the piece, he said, “Chris? That you, you old scalawag?” Relief washed over him like a cool, refreshing breeze.

“Sure as mad around a hornet’s nest!” Chris Nordegaard came hobbling up out of the brush, lowering his old Sharps carbine and poking the brim of his ragged leather hat back up off his broad, liver-spotted forehead. Before the war, he and Spurr had once worked for a stage line up along the Platte River, and they’d gotten together after the war to hunt game two summers for the Central Pacific Railroad. They’d run into each other a few times since, but it had been a good six, seven years since they’d seen each other last.

Nordegaard stopped in front of Spurr, sniffed and snorted, and slid his gaze from Spurr to Erin and back again. “How you been, you ole lawdog? Still sportin’ that badge, I see. Still shootin’ up the territory.” Chuckling, he glanced down at Plowright, who was still struggling as though against invisible hands pinning him flat on his back. “What’d this one do?”

“He’s done enough,” Spurr said. “What in the hell you doin’ out here, Chris? Last I seen you, you was homesteadin’ down around Camp Collins.”

“Wildfire burned me out. My wife, Two Stabs, knew of a quiet spot left here in the shadow of the Wind Rivers, so we come out here to raise a few sheep and get old in peace.
Been
peaceful, too, till I heard you shootin’ up the place. Shoulda known it was you causin’ all that racket. Could hear that thunder all the way to my cabin yonder.” He glanced at a narrow ravine mouth gouged into the ridge on the opposite side of the stream.

Both men fell silent as Erin walked around Plowright, glancing down at him stonily, then walked off toward where her and Spurr’s horses grazed off the side of the trail, about fifty yards away.

Chris glanced sidelong and wolfishly at Spurr. “She, uh…yours, you old buzzard?”

Spurr stared after the woman, who, with each step she took up the trail, favored her right ankle more and more, until she groaned and dropped to the opposite knee, wrapping both hands around the ankle in question.

Spurr walked over to her, as did his old trail partner, Nordegaard, and crouched beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Best rest that ankle, Erin. We’ll find you some shade over by the creek, wrap a bandage around it.”

She looked up with chagrin at the old lawman. “I’m sorry I didn’t hold my position like you said. I guess I just lost patience. I have to get to Jimmy, Spurr. I don’t have time to rest this ankle. Will you fetch me my horse?”

“Like ole Spurr says,” said Nordegaard, crouching on the other side of the the woman, “you’d best rest that ankle. Might be broken.”

“It’s not broke.” Erin sucked a sharp, painful breath and squeezed the ankle once more, sobbing. “I have to keep moving. My son needs me! Please, Spurr—fetch my horse.”

Spurr stared at her. He was on the verge of telling her that her son was not with the Vultures, but he wasn’t sure what the news would do to her. If she’d even believe it.

“Come on, now, Erin. We’ve ridden far enough for one day. You can’t ride with that ankle. We’ll rest it a night, then…”

“No!”

“Now, Erin, them other Vultures might be close, and we can’t linger out here flappin’ our jaws. I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist we hightail it back to Chris’s cabin.” He glanced at his old friend, and when Chris didn’t object, he continued: “We’ll get us a blow and pick up their trail bright and early tomorrow.”

“Damn!” the woman cried angrily. “They’re close, Spurr. They must be real close!”

“If it’s the Vultures you two are after,” Nordegaard said, warily looking around, “they’re
too
close if they’re anywhere west of Denver.”

Spurr glanced at his old partner. “You got a horse over yonder?”

“I got a wagon
and
a horse over yonder.”

“Good. Can you help Mrs. Wilde to it, and take her on back to your digs?” Spurr didn’t want to involve his old partner in his trouble with the Vultures, but the woman needed food and shelter, and she needed her ankle tended. In the back of Spurr’s mind he was hoping she wouldn’t be able to continue fogging the cutthroats’ trail. She’d be safer with Chris, and Spurr could continue trailing the Vultures without having to worry about her.

“Sure, sure. My Two Stabs—don’t worry about the name; she’s over all that—will know just what to do about that ankle. Come on, honey. Just wrap your arms around ole Chris, and I’ll carry you over to my wagon. It ain’t much, but I got some buffler hides to make the ridin’ softer.”

Spurr grabbed his friend’s beefy arm clad in a badly
smoke-stained buckskin sleeve. “Chris,” he said, giving the man a grave look. “Might be trouble.”

“With you, when’s there ever ain’t been trouble?” Chris scoffed as he picked up a sobbing Erin in his arms. “We’ll head on back to my cabin. If you can still track, you old catamount, you’ll find us.”