Last Train to Bannock [Clayburn 02] (6 page)

BOOK: Last Train to Bannock [Clayburn 02]
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    "All I need's some of that coffee."
    "Don't we all." Deputy Roud began pouring into the three cups.
    One of the men in the other cell sat up and whined, "Hey-how about some of that over here?"
    "Shut up and wait!" Roud answered without looking around at the man. "Regular breakfast don't come in for another half hour."
    Clayburn raised his cup to his lips. The coffee scalded going down, but he gulped all of it greedily and refilled his cup before picking up one of the warm rolls. As he ate it and sipped at his second cup, he studied Kosta.
    "Ever handled mule teams, by any chance?"
    The Mexican shook his head, swallowed the chunk of roll he'd been chewing. "Only horses. I've been a blacksmith. But mostly I'm a cook."
    "Best in town," Roud said. "Before you pulled that one-man riot." The deputy looked to Clayburn. "Took five of us to bring him down. He nearly tore my arm off, doing it."
    "I don't remember it," Kosta murmured. "You know I wouldn't do a thing like that sober."
    "Done any trail cooking?" Clayburn asked.
    "Sure. For some of the cattle outfits."
    "Any good with a rifle?"
    Kosta shrugged a massive shoulder. "Like most everybody. Why?"
    "I'm running a string of freight wagons up to Bannock. We still need a couple drivers and guards-and a cook." Clayburn glanced at the deputy. "How many more days has he got to serve?"
    "Fifteen."
    "At ten dollars a day that means he still owes the town a hundred and fifty dollars, right?"
    Jim Roud nodded.
    Clayburn turned back to Kosta. "I might be able to persuade my boss to pay the rest of your fine for you-as an advance on wages. If you're interested."
    Kosta looked at him as though he were his long-lost father. "Interested? I'd crawl all the way to Bannock for a chance to get out of here."
    "We're expecting trouble all along the way," Clayburn warned.
    "What kind?"
    "Snow-if the blizzards hit before we reach Bannock, we could get stuck in the mountains and freeze to death. Apaches-we'll be cutting through hostile territory. And another outfit that's gonna try to stop us from reaching Bannock, or at least to keep us from getting there first."
    He touched a long finger to the plaster stuck on his cheek. "They play rough."
    "You don't know what rough is," Kosta rumbled, "till you been stuck in a little cell long as I have. Get me out of here and you've got a cook. And I
can
handle a rifle. Damn good."
    Jim Roud was looking thoughtful. "Those guards you were saying you needed… What kind of wages you paying?"
    Clayburn told him about the wages and bonus arrangement. "Why? You know somebody good that'd be interested?"
    "Yeah." Roud's ugly face creased in a smile. "Me."
    Clayburn eyed the deputy over the rim of his cup. ' 'Tired of being a lawman?"
    "Kind of. This town life's beginning to bore me. Been a cowhand most of my life. Was, till Kavanaugh talked me into signing on as his deputy. Sounded like action so I took it on. But he's got this town so tamed there's hardly any excitement any more."
    "You'll get all you want with us," Clayburn told him. As far as he was concerned, any man good enough to work for Kavanaugh was good enough for him. Cora Sorel had estimated that she could afford, besides Clayburn, three extra men to act solely as guards. The old buffalo hunter and Jim Roud made two.
    "You're hired," he told Roud. "Any other of Kavanaugh's deputies itching for action and open spaces?"
    "I'll ask around."
    But when Clayburn met Cora Sorel an hour later, he found that the other guard had already been hired.
    Cora Sorel was coming down off the porch of the hotel when Clayburn got there. This morning she was dressed in a trail outfit-a split riding skirt, boots, sheepskin jacket and a flat, wide-brimmed hat. It was quite a change from what she'd worn the night before, but she still looked good to Clayburn.
    The man with her didn't.
    He was about Clayburn's height and age, but much slimmer, with long, delicate hands. There was a withdrawn, deadly quality to the man, something that emanated from the almost womanish grace with which he moved, the contemptuous set of his thin mouth, the empty expression of his thin face and eyes like dirty ice.
    Clayburn knew the breed and disliked it instinctively. A killer. He couldn't be anything else.
    
SIX
    
    Cora stared with shock at Clayburn's face. "What happened to you?"
    "Three of Adler's crew happened to me." He told her about it briefly.
    "Are you all right now? Will you still be able to…"
    "I'm fine," he told her flatly, looking at the man with her.
    Cora introduced them. The man's name was Matt Haycox. They eyed each other and nodded slightly, neither man offering his hand.
    "Matt and I know each other from before," Cora told Clayburn. "He kept order in a gambling house in Butte." She gave Haycox an admiring look that seemed to Clayburn to be contrived for effect. "And he certainly did keep order. I've hired him."
    "To do what?" Clayburn asked tonelessly.
    Haycox smiled faintly, but his eyes remained empty. "To keep order," he said in a voice as dead as his face.
    "As one of our guards," Cora added. "He can handle a gun better than any other man I ever saw.
    Clayburn held down his irritation. "Has she told you I'm wagon captain?" he asked Haycox. "That means you'll have to take orders from me."
    "She told me," Haycox drawled.
    "All right, then take yourself a walk. Miss Sorel and I have things to talk over."
    Haycox's thin mouth grew thinner. He looked to Cora.
    She put her hand on his arm. "You go ahead. Matt. I'll see you at Farnell's freight office at noon."
    Haycox's eyes slid back to Clayburn, held for a moment. Then he drifted away.
    Cora turned to Clayburn. "You deliberately tried to offend him. Why?"
    "I don't like him," Clayburn said simply.
    "Be careful, Clay. He's a dangerous man to toy with."
    "And maybe too dangerous to depend on."
    Cora shook her head. "He's exactly what we need. And don't worry, I can handle him." She smiled. "He had a yen for me. I think he still does."
    "I thought you were going to let me hire the guards," Clayburn said stonily.
    "Subject to my approval," she reminded him. "Any men you hire are bound to consider themselves
your
men. I want one along who'll be
my
man-all the way. Matt Haycox fits that."
    Clayburn's face softened. "I shouldn't have shown you so much of myself in that poker game last night. Now you don't trust me."
    "I told you before, I don't trust
anybody
all the way." She put her hand on his arm exactly as she'd done with Haycox, and her eyes were warm on his. "It's nothing personal, Clay. Just a leftover of some unpleasant experiences in the past."
    She was, Clayburn reflected, as used to gentling men as a mustanger was to gentling horses.
    As they walked together toward the freight office down by the railroad tracks, Cora asked him, "Have you managed to find any other men for us?" She glanced at his bruised face. "Or weren't you in any shape to?"
    Clayburn told her about the three men he'd turned up.
    She liked the sound of Jim Roud and Kosta, but was leery about Ranse Blue. "He sounds too old for the kind of trip we're likely to have."
    "He'll stand up to it as well as any of us. Blue's one of those that toughen with age. And he's spent years dodging hostiles in open country. Just the kind of man we'll need. Somebody that can keep an eye on what Adler's outfit is up to without being spotted."
    Cora Sorel finally accepted his choice, though reluctantly.
    Behind the small adobe building housing Farnell's freighting office there was a warehouse for freight storage, an adobe-walled yard holding the wagons, and a corral in which the mules and horses were kept. Eleven men were gathered waiting in the yard between the big Murphy wagons. Six were the freighters who'd worked steadily for Farnell in the past-the kind of rough, violent-looking men you usually found in jobs like that. Men who could be hard to handle on occasion, but would be just as hard to scare.
    The other five had showed up hoping for a job.
    Cora Sorel let Clayburn do the talking. He told all of them what they faced, holding nothing back-the kind of country they'd have to cross, the blizzards in the mountains, the Apaches, the likelihood of interference from Adler's outfit. The six regulars heard him out with a stoic boredom, not budging, but one of the other five shrugged and walked away, looking sheepish.
    Clayburn questioned the remaining four, rejected one because he'd never handled mule teams before, another because he appeared nervous and didn't ask about the pay. Clayburn had a hunch Adler had sent him.
    If the two Clayburn hired-O'Hara and Fischman-had nerves they didn't show them. Both were big, solid men; the former was ex-army and the latter had once ridden shotgun for the Butterfield Stage. Both were well acquainted with mules.
    Clayburn went over the wagons with the eight of them. There were fifteen wagons, reminders of the time before Farnell had gone bust, when he'd sometimes run as many as twenty in one train. But some of them were now badly in need of repair. They selected the eight in best condition. Leaving the teamsters to prepare the wagons and select their mule teams, he returned to the office and got from Cora a hundred-and-fifty dollar advance on Kosta's wages. Then he left to bail out Kosta and collect Jim Roud and Ranse Blue.
    As he went up the street he met Haycox strolling toward the office.
    They passed each other without speaking.
    
***
    
    Marshal Kavanaugh made no fuss about losing his deputy. "Roud's been acting so itchy lately," he told Clayburn, "he'd've been sure to've got himself in trouble before long. And I'd have to bring him in and lock him up, badge or no badge. But you let him ride some of the wildness out of himself and you'll have a pretty good man on your hands."
    And he was more than pleased to be able to release Kosta, though sorry that Parrish was losing a good cook.
    Leaving the jail, Clayburn sent Kosta to the Farnell Freight Company headquarters to get his chuck wagon ready. He took ex-deputy Jim Roud along with him to hunt up the old buffalo hunter. It took them almost an hour before they found Ranse Blue, sprawled out in a drunken sleep behind a stable at the other end of town.
    It took another half hour, and a dunking in a dirty horse trough, to get Blue awake and on his feet. Even then he couldn't stand without leaning on Roud. He had a horrible hangover and he looked even older than the night before-old and feeble and useless. The way he was, Clayburn knew Cora Sorel would balk at taking him on. And he'd need Blue, maybe more than any of the rest of them. So there was only one thing for it.
    With Roud and Clayburn supporting him, they got Blue to the nearest saloon and bought him a double whiskey in a tumbler. Clayburn watched the old man gulp it, hanging onto the bar with his other hand. Drops of liquor trickled down his gray-whiskered chin, but he got most of it in, his scrawny figure shuddering violently as it went down.
    When the shuddering stopped, Blue straightened a bit and turned his bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes on Clayburn. "Another one of those," he croaked, "and I can maybe let go of this bar."
    Clayburn bought him another double. Blue swallowed it like water, this time without a shudder. He set the empty glass down, sighed weakly, and then took his hand off the bar and straightened all the way. "See?" He wiped a hand over his wrinkled face and, surprisingly, some of his years seemed to drop away from him. He even managed a one-sided grin. "Good as new."
    "Are you going to need whiskey along the trail to keep you going?" Clayburn demanded.
    "Hell no. I only drink in towns. Never take any liquor along with me on the trail."
    "That better be a fact. Because part of our freight'll be a wagonload of liquor. I catch you breaking into that and I'll boot you out of the outfit without a horse-no matter where we are at the time."
    "I said I don't drink on the trail," Blue snarled. "I just needed one big drunk to kiss this lousy town good-by is all. You don't believe me, t'hell with you."
    The strength of Blue's anger reassured Clayburn some. He was turning from the bar when he became aware of the sounds of wagons. Crossing the room, he looked out over the batwings at the street-in time to see George Adler ride by wearing a rough trail outfit. From the way he sat his horse he was obviously no city man, and there was something formidable about Adler that hadn't shown the night before. His wide face was no longer concealing anything, and ruthlessness was written plain on it.
    The bearlike Benjy and the surly kid named Dillon rode on either side of their boss. Behind them rattled Adler's empty wagons, drawn by their teams of mules, following Adler down toward the railroad tracks to be ready when the train pulled in. Since Farnell's Freight Company sided the tracks, there was no such need to get Cora Sorel's wagons lined up for the arrival of the train. There was a ramp leading directly from the tracks into the warehouse, up which they could carry the supplies and roll the barrels of flour, sugar and other foodstuffs Cora had bought for Bannock, as they were off-loaded from the freight cars.
    The loading of Cora's wagons would take place inside Farnell's freight yard.
BOOK: Last Train to Bannock [Clayburn 02]
6.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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