William W. Johnstone (17 page)

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Authors: Massacre Mountain

Tags: #Murder, #Western Stories, #Wyoming, #Westerns, #Fiction, #Sheriffs - Wyoming, #General, #Mountain Life

BOOK: William W. Johnstone
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C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN
 
It sure was dark. Me and Rusty got over there to where the Sanderses had their big house, and stared into the night. There wasn’t no light, not in the house or the carriage house.
“I’m going to wake her up,” I said.
“That’s not going to get you friends at the courthouse.”
“I’ve been wanting to talk to Delphinium for days. I got a feeling she’s the Mama Spider in this web.”
“Don’t you think we should just go over to the carriage house? Talk with the Butcher, or whoever’s there?”
“Women got the say-so,” I said. “That’s what Ma always said.”
“You mind if I go home to bed?”
“You’re coming with me. If she shoots, she’ll need to hit both of us.”
Rusty, he was grinning but it was too dark for me to enjoy it. We walked through a gate in the picket fence and headed upslope toward that mansion. There was a big veranda on it, and we climbed the stairs to that, and finally reached the front door, made of solid walnut. There was a brass knocker on it, so I banged away. It sure was loud. It sounded like a battle between the Confederates and the Union.
It sure took some banging, but finally there came a hard voice out to us.
“Go away,” she said. Her voice was muffled behind that big door.
“Sheriff Pickens, ma’am. We need to talk.”
“I’m not available.”
“Now’s as good a time as any.”
“I have a migraine headache.”
“I suppose you get one most every night, ma’am. Talkin’ with me will make her go away real fast.”
“You’re an idiot, Pickens. Go back to your pigsty.”
“Ma’am, no door’s good enough to stop me if I take a notion to break it. And I got that notion. So you go light a lamp and get yourself settled in the parlor real sweet, and we’ll talk.”
I didn’t hear nothing for a bit.
“You are loathsome,” she said. “All right. Make it quick. My head is throbbing.”
“I hear lot of women get headaches every night, ma’am. But I ain’t married, so it’s all gossip.”
She opened the door, a kerosene lamp in her hand, and we followed her to the gloomy parlor. She looked haughtier than ever, peering down her white nose at us. She was wearing a huge white tent, which hid her bedroom slippers.
“Where’s Hubert?” she asked.
“Cleaning up a mess at the bank, Mrs. Sanders. He’ll tell you about it when he returns. There’s been some trouble. Now, where’s them two fellows out in the carriage house?”
“You are referring to Mr. Berg and Mr. Luke—whatever his surname is. I discharged them this evening. No one is in the carriage barn.”
“Discharged?”
“They failed me. I sent them packing. They were no good.”
“What did you hire them to do, ma’am?”
“Put you out of office. You’re the sole remaining obstacle to scrubbing Doubtful white and pure.”
“Put me out of office?”
“I told them by whatever means. Just do it, and make it permanent. They’re both incompetent. It ought to be no great task to drive a dunce like you clear out of Puma County, and maybe even Wyoming.”
“What did you ask them to do, ma’am?”
“I told you. Drive you out. Get rid of you. Embarrass you. Offend you. I paid them good money for it, and didn’t get a return on my investment. You’re permitting sin to flourish in Doubtful. People drink spirits. People gamble away their every cent. Evil card sharks ruin good families. And other things.”
She was peering at me out of shotgun eyes, two big bores aimed at my heart. You look into her eyes and you don’t see sweetness and light; you see two loads of buckshot snugged in there.
“Men! It’s entirely the moral failing of men. I wish to spare Hubert further temptation.”
“He’s tempted?”
“He’s the worst sinner. I will cleanse Doubtful of every temptation and then maybe we shall find peace in my household.”
“Worst sinner, is he?”
“I am done with you.” She stood, and it was like a white pyramid rising out of the floor.
“How’d he sin?”
She slapped me. That sure was interesting. I been shot at a lot, and I’ve brawled with assorted males a lot, and I’ve been lassoed and whipped and clubbed and pounded with fists, but I’d never been slapped before. It sort of stung, where her dainty little hands brought up the blood in my cheek. She was a pretty tough slapper, all right.
I’d have to think about it. I imagine I said something that set her off but I sure didn’t know what.
“Didn’t mean any offense, ma’am,” I said.
She was shoving me toward her door. Naw, that’s not it, she was kicking me with her dainty feet in their dainty slippers.
“It’s been a pleasant visit,” I said, bowing, and she clobbered my hat.
The big walnut door slammed behind us.
“She sure got set off by something,” I said. “Wish I knew what.”
“Never did understand women,” Rusty said. “Damndest mystery on the planet.”
“I can understand my mother, but I never could understand any of the rest,” I said. “Maybe Delphinium’ll drop by and explain it to me.”
“There’s too many women in Doubtful.”
“Once they come in, there’s no escaping. We’re stuck.”
“We should keep them out,” Rusty said.
“Too late for that.”
“You think we should go check her carriage barn?”
I steered that way, and we scouted the stalls and found nothing in the moonlight. I climbed a ladder to the hayloft, expecting a bullet at any moment. A loft door let in more moonlight, and I peered around some. But they’d cleared out. I poked some old hay, and kicked it loose here and there, but it was just hay. No gold or greenbacks as far as I could see. Rusty, he climbed up and joined me, and we pushed a lot of loose hay around and found nothing.
“You think we’ve covered it?” I asked.
“No banknotes in here,” he said.
“And no robbers neither.”
We climbed down, and cut across moonlit lawn, and got out of there without getting slapped again.
“We found out what we need to know, though,” Rusty said. “We got two crooks to hunt down; an ex-sheriff and a butcher who’s real smart with a toad-stabber.”
“I ain’t sure we do. Someone smart about using nitro blew that safe.”
“Well, you got any other suspects?”
I had to confess I didn’t. I wasn’t real sure we were chasing the right gents, but tracking them was better than sitting on our butts.
That’s when we ran into Hubert, heading back to his house on the hill.
“Well?” Sanders asked.
“We been up talking to your wife,” I said.
“She didn’t have a headache?”
“She said she fired them two in your carriage barn.”
“I didn’t know she’d hired them.”
“She said she did, all right, to get me out of office.”
“Well, Sheriff, you shouldn’t take her literally. She was just using figures of speech.”
“Well, her figure was hidden under a tent, and she slugged me.”
“I am speechless,” Sanders said.
“You got the place cleaned up?”
“I’ll let my cashier, Larousse, clean up the broken glass. But everything else is done. The bank was robbed of eleven thousand, five hundred ninety-two dollars. But there’s more. The safe is ruined, and can be replaced only with great difficulty, from Pittsburgh, and that means I’m out another seven hundred ninety dollars. I’ve lost twelve thousand dollars, and you’re harassing Delphinium.”
“She said getting rid of me was to keep you from sin.”
“She said that, did she?”
“She said I’m the main obstacle. Get rid of me, and you’ll be rescued from all the temptations we got around here. I don’t know what you need rescuing from but it sounds pretty bad.”
“You understand, Pickens, what it means to have a wife who has a headache every night?”
“I ain’t ever been married, sir. But it sure sounds lonely.”
He sighed. “Lonely’s as good a word as any. Mrs. Sanders has had a migraine every night since our wedding day. ‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. But if they do, get a shoe, and hit ’em all over til they’re black and blue.’”
He headed up the slope toward his wooden palace.
“He’s a pretty nice feller,” Rusty said. “I don’t think he married real well.”
When we got back to the sheriff’s office, there was a little feller sitting on the steps.
“I’m glad I found you,” said Alphonse de Jardine. “I feared the worst.”
“Feared?”
“This town is abuzz, it’s aflame, with rumors.”
I unlocked and let him in, lifted the smoke coated chimney of the lamp, and struck a lucifer.
“Rusty, how come you ain’t cleaned these chimneys?”
“Because I wasn’t your deputy until a bit ago,” he said.
“Is the Grand Luxemburg Follies safe?” the little fart asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“There were lamps lit in the bank. One does not see lamps in banks at night.”
“What’s that got to do with your company?”
“Ralston went over there to make a night deposit of our receipts, and saw Sanders back in there, and disorder. Papers littering the floor. So he brought his deposit back, and now there’s no safe place to keep it.”
“Safe got blown,” I said. “Got cleaned out, too. But we’ve got some badasses in mind.”
“That’s truly bad news. When did it happen?”
“Middle of the second act.”
“During the show?”
“Wasn’t many people from around here on the street. They was all in there watching your vivid tablets.”
“
Tableaux vivants
,” he said. “Live scenes.”
“Whatever. Bare babes, if you ask me. They used blasting oil, nitro, and blew Sanders’s safe door open and made off with the loot. It might have been an inside job. Them doors were locked.”
“Stolen, ah yes, ripped away from the rightful owners. Including two box office receipts we were euchred out of by that miserable excuse for a judge,” he said. “But you have prospects?”
“Yep, the Watch and Ward hired guns.”
Jardine cocked his head, tilting his giant stovepipe hat. “I like that. I might invent a scene in the Follies and call it the Watch and Ward Hired Guns. Great box office.”
“Well, we’ll nail ’em. We got two good suspects. And they ain’t going far.”
“Will we be safe leaving Doubtful?”
“Safe? Oh, you’re closing tomorrow, right?”
“We’re pulling out right after the curtain falls. We’ll be ten miles toward Casper before we camp. Schedules, you know. You pick up the pieces and keep on going, and open up, and get your show going.”
“You’ll leave a man behind here,” I said.
“Pinky Pearl. Best advance man in the business. Now I have none. I’ll need to hire someone to set us up. Someone to book rooms, get cash advances for salary, all of that. I’ll be leaving a piece of my heart here in Doubtful, sir. Take good care of that grave.”
“I’ll do more than that. I’ve got a good idea who pushed the toad-stabber into your advance man, and pretty quick we’ll be bolting together the Puma County gallows.”
“Ah,
mon ami
, that brings me to a delicate matter. There is lawlessness here. In the space of a few days there has been murder, theft, a holdup, the most foul destruction of your trusted horse, and more. My poor company will ride without protection into the night after the curtain comes down. Our bags will be in our coaches, the gear in the wagons. And we will be taking our share of the box office, all save for Ralston’s portion. How safe will we be? And where can we get help? And what’s to stop these outlaws from stopping us, stealing what little we possess?”
“I’ll escort you to the Puma County line,” I said. “Maybe I can find one of my former deputies to take you the rest of the way. I’m thinking of a fellow named De Graff. I’ll talk to one if you want. But they’ll want some pay for it.”
“Ah, but Sheriff, we have so little. We lost the gross from two showings in court. I can’t afford to pay such knights in shining armor. We will be naked to these bandits.”
“I guess them gals are used to that,” I said.
“Sheriff, you are a card, truly a card,” he said. “Maybe the two of clubs, eh?”
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-EIGHT
 
The next morning word of the bank heist was all over town. A mess of people were standing around, eyeing the bank, which was closed. There wasn’t anyway a body could get some cash out of his account or put some in. There wasn’t any way a merchant could load up with greenbacks to make change. There wasn’t any way a boss man could get a payroll together to give to his workers. No way a rancher could pay his cowboys. No way a woman could get funds to buy groceries. No way Turk, the livery hostler, could buy hay, or get paid for renting a stall and feed for an animal. It was as if Doubtful had sort of croaked. That eleven thousand, that was more money than the town used in a month, and now there was nothing.
Sanders was in there but staying hid. His clerks were in there, too. But the bank was shut tight and no one was saying if it would ever open, and whether a lot of folks were out a lot of money, or if Doubtful itself would survive long without the cash that goes into all buying and selling. I got waylaid by all sorts of people with a mess of questions.
“You gonna get them robbers?”
“I’m sure working on it.”
“Is there any cash left in there?”
“No greenbacks that I know of. Some coins, I think.”
“Gold go, too?”
“All of it.”
“How come you’re not chasing the crooks?”
“You tell me who they are and where they’re going, and I’ll be hot on their tail.”
“It’s that theater company. We never shoulda let them in here.”
“You tell me who, and I’ll bring them in.”
That slowed them down some, but not much. “You should round up the lot, search everything they got, and then you’d find it.”
“Not a bad idea, but I think Judge Rampart might find some fault with it.”
“He’s not worth spit. You arrest them all, and you’ll get it back fast.”
There were a mess of conversations like that. But mostly people were plumb scared. Take down the bank, take down Doubtful. But even as the crowds began predicting doom for the whole county, the storekeepers were making other arrangements. People began writing checks and IOUs. Merchants made change with chits. Bottles of red-eye became a sort of money. A woman might get groceries for some red-eye. A merchant might offer a bottle of rum as change for a twenty. And a few gold coins came out of hiding, and that helped some. But the town was mostly paralyzed, and people were not far from forming a vigilance committee and going after anyone they thought might be carrying that loot.
I thought maybe I could improve on that a little. “I’m fixing to get a posse going, soon as I’ve got more to work with,” I said here and there. Pretty quick I had thirty, forty men ready to ride. I thought that might be an improvement on some lynchings.
My main interest was tracking down Luke the Butcher and Ike Berg. It looked to me like the former sheriff of Medicine Bow County had gone bad, and the pair had pulled off the heist after the old gal had fired them.
I found Turk hiding in his office.
“Did Ike Berg come around here? And was the Butcher with him?”
“He did. He got his nag yesterday. I haven’t seen that deputy. He don’t own a horse.”
“Berg say where he was going?”
“Not a word.”
“Did he have bags? A pack horse?”
“No, he saddled up, tied a small bundle behind the cantle, and rode out.”
That wasn’t very promising. “When was that?”
“Middle of yesterday.”
“I’ll need a horse tonight. I’m taking the show people as far as the county line.”
He studied me a while, not wanting to help me out, but finally he nodded.
“They’ve paid me, I’ll say that for them. They’ll be loading wagons before the last show’s over.”
“That’s when I’ll want a horse. Back early in the morning.”
“We sure didn’t have no trouble until that opera house opened up.”
That was true. There’d been big trouble in Doubtful from the day the first show arrived.
I discovered advance men pasting up the bills for the next show all over town. They’d brush some sort of flour paste on the back of a showbill, post the bill and then brush it down real good, and it’d stick there for a while. There would be three dark days, and then the next show would roll into Doubtful. It was called the Royal Arabian Nights, and it looked real interesting. There was a mess of fellows in turbans pictured on there, and pretty girls in sort of misty outfits. A
N
I
NTIMATE
L
OOK AT THE
H
AREM OF
S
HEIK
B
ARBOUSSE
,
with
F
OURTEEN
W
IVES
and S
EVENTEEN
C
HILDREN
and T
WELVE
E
UNUCHS
. I didn’t know what them eunuchs were, but Sammy Upward would know. I sure didn’t want any around Doubtful. We had enough trouble without twelve eunuchs on the loose. I studied on the words, wondering what was coming. B
ELLY
D
ANCERS
. S
WORD
-S
WALLOWERS
AND
F
IRE
-E
ATERS
. T
WO
J
UGGLERS
. T
WO
M
ASKED
E
XECUTIONERS
W
ILL
S
HOW
A
B
EHEADING
. N
OT FOR THE
S
QUEAMISH
.
I sure wanted a front seat for all that. I didn’t know if I’d get paid, not that the county’s cash got stole, but if I could get in, I wanted to see all that stuff. I never met a cowboy who could do half that stuff.
I headed over to the Last Chance Saloon, looking for Sammy Upward. He was there, all right, with a baseball bat, ready to clobber two cowboys that were starting a ruckus.
“You fellows, you get out of town,” I said.
“Try me,” one cowboy said. He was pretty well swizzled.
“I’ll turn you into a eunuch,” I said. I didn’t know what one was, but it was worth trying.
That there cowboy turned pale. He nudged the one he was brawling with. “You hear that? The sheriff’s gonna do that?”
The other one, a ranny named Rudy, he quit brawling and turned real quiet.
Upward, he laughed like mad. Them two brawlers stared at me, like I had come from the South Pole.
The cowboys both reached for their privates and backed out of there, holding tight to their pants. That was pretty good. I watched them leave and checked to see that they got on their nags, which they did.
“Sammy, what’s a eunuch?” I asked.
“Pickens, if you don’t know, I ain’t gonna tell you.”
“Never heard of one. But it sure scared off them two dudes.”
“All cowboys are eunuchs,” Sammy said. “You get to sitting on a horse all day, every day, that’s what you get. A mess of eunuchs. You ever see children on a ranch?”
I was beginning to see the drift of it. “How many days before you get turned into one?”
Sammy leaned over the bar and whispered in my ear. “Sometimes it takes only twenty-four hours.”
I reached for mine, but everything was still there, all right. But now I was sweating that trip to the county line this night.
“How do I know?” I asked.
“Cotton, you ask Belle over to your boardinghouse. She’ll help you figure it out.”
“You sure that’s proper? Ask her to check my eunuchs?”
“You just ask her,” Sammy said.
“I’ll do that. Have you seen Luke the Butcher? I want to drag his butt over to my jailhouse and practice some butchering on him.”
“Not for a couple of days. I heard he’s blown town.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. I want him. If you get word of him, would you let me know?”
“Did he do the bank heist?”
“I’m going to ask him, and it won’t be polite.”
“Did that lousy lawman go, too? That’s what I heard. Old Lady Sanders kicked his ass out of the county.”
Sammy was sure full of rumors. I don’t know where they came from, but he had collected his share of them.
By the time I got over to the opera house, the Watch and Ward people were waving their signs again, and the variety company was sliding through the stage door for the final show in Doubtful, Wyoming. I didn’t see Delphinium Sanders, and could well understand why. Her husband’s bank was broke. I stayed close, determined to prevent trouble, but after a while it became obvious that there would be no trouble. Few people were showing up to buy tickets from Ralston. There was no line.
When there was a break, I asked him about it.
“It’s the bank heist,” Ralston said. “No one wants to spend a dime. They don’t know when they’ll see cash. Clerks don’t know when they’ll get another brown envelope. It’s going to be a long, dull night.”
I hadn’t thought of that. The bank robbery was shutting down all business in town, including that of the Grand Luxemburg Follies. I saw another twenty or thirty people duck into the opera house as the orchestra started up. This time the Watch and Warders simply vanished. Previous evenings they had lingered, ready to embarrass theater-goers during the intermission. But not this final eve. They went home.
Ralston did his books early, and eyed me.
“There’s not a hundred dollars here.” He sighed. “If this keeps up, I’ll fold. I can’t run an opera house on thin air.”
“What about the next show?”
“Not well-attended. They’ve had troubles getting booked. They may run into more trouble here.”
“I’ve never seen a sword-swallower.”
“He really does it; runs the thing right down his throat.”
“There must be easier ways to make a buck,” I said. “Like fire-eating.”
“How about executioners?” he asked. “There’s going to be some beheadings on stage.”
“I don’t care how many heads roll. What I want is the harem. Lots of girls in the harem?”
“More likely old broads who’ve got varicose veins. They’ll wear a lot of pancake.”
“Sounds like a tough life.”
Ralston eyed me. “Show business, writing novels, playing music. Those are guaranteed to break your piggy bank. For every one who gets lucky, a thousand starve.”
“Why do it?”
“Because we’re all bonkers.”
I couldn’t hardly argue with that. When the show was deep into its final act, I headed over to Turk’s Livery Barn to saddle up a horse. I found the company teamsters loading up their wagons and coaches. They would roll as fast as they could break down the sets in the opera house and get the cast into the coaches.
“You got a nag for me?” I asked Turk.
“Saddle him yourself, and if the county don’t pay me, I’ll come after you.”
He sure was grouchy. But everyone in Doubtful was grouchy. And there were people there in the dark, waiting for the show to roll away. I was pretty sure what was going on in the heads of those folks, mostly merchants but also a few cowboys and even a lady or two. They believed that somehow or other the variety show was walking out of town with all their cash.
I thought I better be alert for trouble, knowing how people felt. So I wandered through that bunch, just seeing who wore sidearms and who didn’t. There were a few well-armed fellers out there, in spite of a ban on firearms inside city limits. It gave me pause. Should I tell them all to get rid of them now, before I pinched them? I counted a dozen or so openly armed men, and didn’t like my options. I was a peace officer and suddenly it looked like there’d be a war right there in front of Turk’s Livery.
Maybe a little maneuvering might be better than trying to force the issue.
I approached the head teamster, a feller named Jeff.
“There’s trouble brewing here,” I said.
“We’re used to it.”
“I’m hoping you’ll get these coaches over to the opera house and leave town from there just as fast as you load up.”
“They follow. They always follow.”
“You run into trouble regularly?”
“Sure. They pull their revolvers and hold us up. About when we’re ready to roll, they surround Jardine’s coach and tell him to toss the money bags.”
“Then what?”
“Jardine always has a few real heavy ones, well tied-up and hard to get open, and he pitches them to the ground, and the town people haul them off and we roll away.”

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