Last Lawman (9781101611456) (28 page)

On the breeze was the faint smell of wood smoke.

Erin’s scream echoed in his head. He knew it was her. He recognized her voice. Something told him it hadn’t been a scream of terror. It had been an expression of unbearable agony.

Like the agony of a mother learning that she’d deceived herself. That her boy hadn’t been alive as her mind had fooled itself into believing, that little Jim was dead.

Equal to Spurr’s anxiety was his sorrow. A close second was rage. He wanted to go in blasting at the Vultures, to kill as many as he could and in the process snatch Erin out of their clutches as she’d wanted to take back her boy. But if he went about it in such a corkheaded way, he’d only get himself and probably Erin killed. If she wasn’t already dead.

At the bottom of the steep, twisting trail, he stopped to
rest his legs. His knees and thighs ached. He drew a deep breath and did not like the whine of his tired lungs. They sounded like an unoiled winch.

“Gonna have to go easy on the tobbaco, I reckon,” he whispered to himself, knowing he wouldn’t.

Drawing another breath that squeaked like some little animal in his shirt, he walked forward but stopped after only two steps. He dropped to a knee. He’d heard the quiet ring of a spur off to his left.

Raising his Winchester slowly, he resisted the temptation to rack a shell into the chamber. The scrape could be heard for a quarter mile along this silent ravine. He’d let his opponent or opponents make the first move.

He didn’t have to wait long. A gun boomed and flashed about twenty feet away, on the other side of a darkly glistening stream. The slug spanged loudly off a rock over Spurr’s right shoulder. The rifle’s report reverberated between the slopes, dying slowly as though sucked straight up to the stars.

Spurr pumped a round and fired at the red spot only now fading from his retinas. In the flash of his own fire he saw a pair of legs and spurred boots flying behind a rock. The man had known Spurr would fire at the man’s own blast, but he’d thrown himself to cover only a half a second before Spurr’s slug would have drilled him.

As it was, the slug hammered a tree but even before the echo of the shot had died, he fired three more shots toward where the killer had gone to ground. He couldn’t see enough to know if he’d hit anything, so on the heels of his third blast, he threw himself hard to the left with the desperate abandon of a much younger man.

He paid for it, too—the racking pain hammering through his left shoulder and hip. Something prickly ground into that knee. Knowing he couldn’t lie here and cry over his aches, he heaved himself to his feet and bolted straight up
the ravine, running hard, holding his rifle in one hand and pumping his arms and legs.

Behind him, the killer’s gun sparked in the night once, twice, three, then four more times. The slugs slapped the water to Spurr’s right, thumped into the brush, cracking branches. One slug screamed off a rock, and a shard ground itself into Spurr’s right cheek.

He brushed the shard away and dropped behind a tree growing at a dark angle from the left ravine bank.

“He’s down here!” shouted the gunman now sixty or seventy yards away from Spurr, though the lawman couldn’t see him in the darkness. The man laughed crazily. “Hey, Spurr, that you? Why, you old devil—we got the telegram you sent!”

Spurr raked air in and out of his lungs. Sweat dribbled down his cheeks. His heart chugged tiredly, racking his ribs.

“Hell, we got
both
of them telegrams you sent strapped over their saddles!” shouted a voice up the slope on the far side of the stream. This man, too, laughed. “You might still got some hunt left in you, old dog, but you’re all alone out here or I miss my guess!”

The big talker was likely Clell Stanhope. While he’d been gassing, Spurr had heard the thudding of men running around atop the ridge, several pounding down the side, rustling brush and cracking branches. Desperation hammered him. Even with Ryan and Plowright gone to Glory, Stanhope must have seven or eight men left.

Seven or eight hungry Vultures—unabashed man killers.

Spurr wished he had another hand or two. Chris Nordegaard had wanted to ride along with him, to back his play, but Spurr had refused. Chris had been a good hand with a shooting iron in his day, but he was even older than Spurr now. And Spurr wasn’t about to allow Two Stabs to become a widow on his behalf.

He grabbed a rock and hurled it down the canyon where most of the thrashing was concentrated. When he heard it splash dully in the shallow stream, he took off running farther up canyon. He had nowhere else to go, but he hoped the rock would confuse the Vultures if only slightly.

They were shouting at each other behind him. Water splashed and brush crunched. Someone took a shot—a pinprick flash of stabbing light that Spurr spied out the corner of his eye. The shooter had fired toward the far bank and the trail down which Spurr had ridden.

A germ of optimism sprouted in him. They weren’t sure where he was. He could hear Stanhope shouting straight down the ravine behind him, and a couple of others farther down the ravine. Others, however, were making their way toward Spurr, but he could tell from the sounds that they weren’t moving very fast.

Wary of an ambush.

Spurr got an idea. He turned into the stream, swung around, and triggered four shots quickly from his hip. The shots echoed, one screeching off a rock, another making a chugging sound in the stream. One evoked a clipped yell, and the old lawman gave a wry grin as he turned and started up the north side of the ravine, opposite the side he’d come down.

He had to find Erin. It was his fault she was here in the first place. He should have told her that her son was dead and sent her back to Sweetwater. She’d have been crazy with grief, but she’d have been alive.

Downstream, the shouting grew louder. Guns barked and flashed. The slugs splashed in the dark water that Spurr had left. Halfway up the bank, feeling as though his heart was in his throat and strangling him, he stopped and hurled two rocks and branches into the creek, a few feet beyond where he’d fired. They’d think he’d run on up the canyon. He hoped they’d left their camp unattended, and that he’d find Erin there.

Alive.

He sucked a long, deep breath, wincing against the stabbing pains in his chest and, pushing off his knee with one hand, holding his rifle in the other, he continued ascending the bank through the brush, moving as quietly as he could in his winded condition. Sweat engulfed him, trickled like ice chunks down his back. While the shooting and shouting continued behind him, he paused at the top of the bank and dropped to a knee.

He sleeved sweat from his brow, drawing painful draughts of air into his lungs that felt little larger than prunes, and saw lights to his right. Lamplit windows shone about sixty yards back the way he’d come.

“Oh, lordy,” Spurr wheezed, heaving himself to his feet. “If you’re up there, whoever you are—Jehova, Great Father, the Four Winds—I could sure use a hand ’bout now. Know I don’t deserve it…” He tugged his hat brim down and began jogging toward the cabin, the words bouncing out of him with each clawing breath. “But the woman sure does.”

He wouldn’t scout the place as thoroughly as he normally would. No time. He only hoped the woman was there, alive and alone. And that the Vultures didn’t savvy his ploy. If not, at least he’d take a few of these bastards with him to hell’s smoking gates. He hoped Clell was one of them. He owed Dusty and the other murdered lawmen that much.

The cabin looked dilapidated—probably only used by Stanhope. An old ranch house, long abandoned. As Spurr ran to the wall facing him, he looked in a window, saw a mess of saddle gear, strewn trash, an old deal table, several chairs, one leather one that had likely been left by whomever had built the place. There was a small hearth but it wasn’t lit; a coffeepot smoked on a monkey stove in the middle of the shabby living area.

Spurr ran around the back of the place, hoping for a back door. He found one hanging off one leather hinge. As he reached for the handle, he glanced toward the corral and
stable flanking the place. His heart lightened. A saddled horse stood outside the corral, tied to a slat, whipping its tail up and down and sideways and craning its neck to look toward Spurr. It had probably been used by one of the Vultures for keeping watch from a ways beyond the hideout.

Spurr pulled the door open, found himself in a dimly lit hall, with the main area ahead, lit by guttering lamps. He could hear nothing, no one, except the Vultures continuing to shout and shoot along the ravine.

Keeping his voice pitched low, Spurr said, “Erin?”

He moved inside, walking down the short hall paneled with vertical boards, some of which were missing. The stove must not have been well vented; smoke hung thick, watering Spurr’s eyes. There was a curtained doorway on each side of the hall. He swept the right curtain aside, saw nothing but the shadows of a few sticks of haphazardly arranged furniture. He swept the left curtain away from the frame, peered into the dark room quickly, then let the curtain drop back into place. Turning back to the room, he looked in once more, saw a silhouette on the floor. Aiming his rifle guardedly, he stepped into the room and crouched over the woman lying on her side, facing the far wall.

She was fully clothed but with her wrists and ankles tied. Spurr recognized the brown serape and the baggy denims with the leg bottoms rolled. Thick hair hung in loose waves around Erin’s shoulders. Spurr could see by the starlight pushing through the room’s single window that her eyes were open. They shone like the water had shone at the bottom of the ravine—dully glistening. She didn’t move.

Spurr’s heart chugged. Dead…?

“Erin?”

He knelt beside her, closed a hand over her shoulder. She recoiled slightly.

“Erin, it’s Spurr.” He licked his lips, squeezed her shoulder harder, vaguely surprised by her lack of reaction. “I come to get you out of here.”

“Leave me here, Spurr,” she said in a hauntingly dull voice.

Spurr remembered the scream that had drawn him here. She knew about the boy.

“Can’t do that.” Quickly, glancing at the window and then at the curtained doorway behind him, he leaned his rifle against the wall and drew his bowie knife from the well of his right moccasin. He sawed through the ropes binding the woman’s ankles and wrists, then returned the knife to its sheath.

“Can you walk?”

“Please leave me, Spurr.” Again, her voice was dull, startlingly lifeless. “I don’t want to go with you.”

“Look here, damnit, Erin—I rode out here to get you back, and by god I’m gonna do it.”

He straightened, grabbed one of her arms, and crouching, pulled her up over his left shoulder. With a grunt, he staggered to the wall, grabbed his rifle, then swung toward the door. He stopped just in front of it. Running footsteps sounded outside the cabin, spurs ringing raucously. Breaths rasped. Then the man was pounding across the porch and into the cabin’s front door.

“Senorita?” a man called, breathless but buoyant. His voice, Spanish accented, was pitched high with mockery. “Are you alone, senorita? The old lawman hasn’t come for you, has he?” He tittered girlishly.

His boots thumped as he moved forward.

Spurr whispered a curse. Stanhope had sent a man back to check the cabin.

The man’s boots thudded slowly, crackling grit on the trash-littered floor, the spurs now ringing faintly, floorboards squeaking under the Mexican’s weight. Spurr had already racked a shell into his Winchester’s breech. Now, without setting Erin down—she hung limp as laundry over his shoulder—he stepped through the curtain and thumbed back the rifle’s hammer.

The Mexican stopped at the end of the hall, silhouetted against the lamp and candlelight. He held a rifle negligently in his left hand, obviously still expecting Spurr to be in the ravine yonder.

His jaw dropped. Spurr gave a cold smile and squeezed the rifle’s trigger. The report was like a thunderclap in the close confines. The Mexican yelped as the bullet slammed him up and back. He hit the floor with a bang. He groaned, softly, and moving his legs slightly, painfully, he lifted his
hands toward the blood-spewing hole in the middle of his brown-and-red-striped serape.

Erin had jerked with a start at the rifle’s report, but now she flopped helplessly down Spurr’s back, too wretched even to struggle against his assistance. He wheeled, strode as quickly as he could down the hall and out into the night, angling toward the corral. Eerily, the shooting in the ravine had fallen silent, and only one man was shouting though Spurr couldn’t hear what he was saying.

Most likely, the Vultures had heard the shot and were switching course for the cabin. Spurr moved quickly, sort of hobbling as he closed on the saddled horse, which danced away from him and pulled against its tied reins. The other horses trotted around, manes glistening in the starlight.

Spurr leaned his rifle against a corral post, then lifted Erin into the saddle. “Oh, Spurr, leave me.”

“The hell I will!” Anger burned in him now—at both her and the Vultures. His anger for Erin was tempered with tenderness, but he had not come all this way to allow her to throw herself to the wolves.