A Dangerous Man (6 page)

Lashed by wind, snow, and sleet, the open overloaded wagon trundled south from Cimarron, the settlement that marked the cutoff from the old Santa Fe Trail. To the west, the wagon and two harnessed mules were dwarfed by the massive, jagged bulk of the Tooth of Time Ridge and beyond that, hidden by lowering clouds, the tall peaks of the Cimarron Mountains.

“This is gonna be another wild goose chase, Helga,” the man at the reins yelled to the fur-wrapped woman sitting in back. He'd raised his voice above the roar of the wind.

“Sure is,” agreed the man beside the driver. “Crow Wallace ain't around here. He's probably in Old Mexico by now.”

Helga Eckstrom wailed, shook her head and set her yellow pigtails flying. “I must find my darling Crow. He needs his Helga now more than ever before.”

“Hell, he could even be hung by this time, Helga,” the driver said.

She shrieked, a significant sound from the throat of a three hundred and fifty pound woman. “Don't you dare say that, Dan Culp. I know my Crow is alive and waiting for me.”

Culp and the man next to him exchanged glances.

“What do you think, Jack?” Culp said. “Is it a go or are we turning back?”

“Don't whisper!” Helga screamed. “I can't hear you when you whisper.”

“We ain't whispering, Helga,” Culp said. “We're planning a route.”

“It's over there! The man in Cimarron said it's over there!” The woman jabbed a fat forefinger at the Tooth of Time Ridge.

“We can't go over them peaks, and the passes are blocked, damn it all, Helga,” Culp said. “We got to keep on this heading then swing west at Rayado Peak.”

“The man said it's over there! Over there!” Helga wailed. “Over there!”

Culp drew rein and turned in the seat, a white maelstrom of the snow cartwheeling around him. “Helga, the damned ridge rises near two and a half thousand feet straight up,” he yelled. “God Himself couldn't get a wagon and two worn-out mules over that.”

“Besides, there ain't no towns in this wilderness south of the Turkey Mountains,” the man called Jack said.

“Over there! Over there!” Helga shrilled. “It's over there!” Her round face was bitten by cold, her cheeks like two red apples in a pink ceramic bowl. One of her pigtails had become undone and strands of her hair coiled and uncoiled in the wind like yellow snakes.

Helga Eckstrom was twenty-six years old that winter, a schoolmarm by profession. Crow Wallace's short visit to Cimarron a couple of months before had left her with a small problem in her belly that was rapidly growing larger.

Crow had told her he was on the scout. He believed the law was closing in on him and that he'd be gone when the baby was born.

Cimarron was fast becoming a boomtown, the center of a gold rush that attracted thousands of miners and some of them had already struck it rich. Fancy women and gamblers had arrived first, followed by grifters, goldbrick artists, claim jumpers, gunmen, whiskey peddlers, hangers-on, and dance hall loungers, all of them conducting business in a wide open town free from church bells.

According to Crow, where sin comes easy but never cheap, the law was bound to follow. When he became convinced that hard-eyed men were beginning to look at him strangely, he decided to leave town.

The note he'd left on Helga's bedside table stated his intentions.

 

Going sowth. See you in sum other town.

 

Helga, of an excitable Nordic nature, immediately panicked and the Viking in her took over. She retrieved her life savings from under the mattress and hired a couple of shifty characters to take her south in a mule wagon.

Dan Culp and Jack Flood, in imminent danger of being hung by vigilantes for being damned nuisances, had readily agreed to Helga's terms.

But adrift in a land of vast distances, brooding mountains, and black, ominous shadows, the two men were about to renege on their part of the bargain.

Culp climbed down from the wagon seat and walked back to Helga. Her enormous body was wrapped in a buffalo skin coat and she was angry enough to spit.

Snow circling around him, the man's breath smoked as he said, “We're turning around. Me an' Jack will take our chances back in Cimarron. I'd rather get hung than freeze to death.”

Helga's rage grew as the berserker in her made her throw caution to the winds. “I paid you fifty dollars to take me to Comanche Crossing, and that's where we're going.” She pointed at the ridge and shrieked, “Over there! Over there!”

Flood, his gray eyes set close together, bookending the bridge of his broken nose, produced a massive revolver. “One more word out of you, lady, and we'll dump you right here. You can walk to Comanche Crossing.”

In her haste to leave, the only thing of value Helga had brought with her was her porcelain chamber pot, made in Sweden by her late father, a potter by trade. She threw the vessel at Flood, but the man did not react as it bounced off his chest.

The Ute arrow bristling from his throat had already killed him.

Appalled, Dan Culp was frozen to the spot for a moment, then he picked up Flood's revolver, his eyes probing through the snowfall. He saw them then, five Ute warriors wearing rabbit skin capes, their long hair falling over their shoulders. They were painted for war.

A rifle bullet thudded close to Culp's feet and an arrow flashed over his head.

Knowing he was moments from death, fear and desperation drove the man. He dragged Helga from the wagon, dumped her onto the ground and then jumped into the seat, Helga cursing him in a language he did not understand. Nor did he care.

Culp gathered up the reins, screamed as an arrow bladed deep into his right shoulder, and hoorahed the mules into a turn.

The Utes were almost on top of him.

He slapped the team into a run, grabbed the revolver from his waistband and snapped off a shot. Then another.

Both missed.

A long way off their home range, the Utes were wary. Pressed hard by vengeful Apaches, they'd already lost four of their number and had been forced to release the horses they'd stolen. Never a numerous tribe, the loss of four young braves was already a disaster. Culp's shots had come close, and they could not afford to lose more.

They fired at the man as he slowly disappeared into the gloom, the parted snow closing behind him like a lace curtain.

There was only Helga left.

A short, sturdy figure, she struggled to her feet and stared at the Indians coming closer to her, walking their horses.

“Get away from me,” she yelled. “Go away.”

Had they been a hunting party, the Utes might have taken Helga with them. But in fear of the Apaches, a woman of her great size would only slow them down and eat too much.

The Utes drew rein, but for one warrior astride a gaudy Appaloosa who rode forward, a bow in his hand.

The man's face was painted black, a sign of mourning, and his amber eyes were hard and merciless.

It took five arrows to bring Helga down.

Later, the Utes would say that she was a strange creature, half human, half buffalo, and her medicine was strong.

In search of her beloved Crow Wallace, Helga Eckstrom died a long way from her native Sweden. Her skeletal remains were not discovered until 1928. She was identified when her name was discovered on the bottom of a ceramic chamber pot.

The day after the deaths of Sheriff Frank Harm, Clete Miller, and Pete McPherson, Mayor John York called an emergency town meeting and inquest, doddering old Judge Matthias Brooke presiding.

Brooke, in his late eighties and prone to incontinence, was quick to declare that the three men were most foully murdered by a person or persons unknown. He then banged his gavel and declared, “This inquest is now concluded.”

It wasn't, of course, and as the judge fled for the outhouse, the finger pointing began.

Tom Archer, the owner of the dry goods store, was the first to speak. “There are three strangers in town, all of them violent men.”

To a ripple of “Hear-hear” and “Well said,” Archer felt emboldened. Holding up his thumb, he said, “One. Bill Longley, a desperado well known to the law.” A forefinger now joined the thumb. “Booker Tate, a frontier tough and ruffian.” He raised his middle finger. “Tam Sullivan, a bounty-hunter and the killer of the outlaw Crow Wallace.”

After the muttered comments died away, Archer said, “Any one of those men, or all three in league, could have murdered Frank Harm and the others.”

“I say we arrest the rogues and string 'em up after we find them guilty,” stated a florid-faced man with blue pouches under his eyes.

This brought cries of agreement and even a couple “Huzzahs!”

Mayor York rose to his feet. “Do we all agree that the three men mentioned are desperate characters and no doubt skilled gunmen?”

“They're draw fighters all right, a class of violent Texans spawned by the late war and I despise each and every one of them, seed, breed, and generation,” Archer said. “Remember Bodie Burgess?”

Silent nods confirmed that everybody in Comanche Crossing remembered the thin, sallow man whose skin was pitted by childhood smallpox. He'd ridden into town two years before bringing with him a reputation as a named draw fighter and killer.

Archer, not trusting to people's memories, recounted that Burgess had been in town two days when he got into an argument in the saloon over a card game.

Irritated, the gunman knifed one man and shot another and only the quick thinking of Sheriff Harm saved the day when he blew Burgess's backbone apart with two barrels of buck.

“Now we have three such gunmen in our fair town, and one or all of them must answer to a court of law for poor Frank Harm's death.” Archer sat down in his chair with the air of a man who has fairly made a compelling case and nodded sagely as people whispered congratulations into his ear.

To everyone's surprise, Lisa York got to her feet, a pretty girl with a fine straight back and bright, intelligent eyes. “I'd like to ask Mr. Archer a question.”

“Ask away, little girlie,” the storeowner said, grinning.

Lisa knew she was being patronized and tilted her chin. “It's about the three gunmen you mentioned.”

Archer nodded. “Good, you paid attention. So what's your question?”

“Who's going to arrest them, Mr. Archer? You?”

The storekeeper hesitated a moment. Then he said, “We'll go in force, armed with rifles and shotguns.”

“How many more widows and orphans can this town afford?” Lisa asked.

“I'm not catching your drift, young lady.” Archer was irritated and it showed.

“You'll be going toe-to-toe against three professional gunmen. I ask the question again. How many widows and orphans can this town afford?”

Archer made no reply, nor did anyone else.

The faces of the women in the crowd were stiff, as though it was a problem they'd never anticipated.

Lisa glanced around the crowd and spotted the liveryman. “Clem, you've been in some wild towns in your time. Ever see a skilled Texas draw fighter shoot?”

Weaver smiled, somewhat embarrassed that the limelight had shifted to him. “A few, I reckon, in my time. They're a rare breed, mainly because so many of them die young.”

“If the men of this town try to arrest three skilled draw fighters, how many widows after the smoke clears?” Lisa asked him.

The old man didn't hesitate for even the space of a heartbeat. “A dozen. Give or take one or two.”

Above the babble that followed this pronouncement, Weaver raised his voice. “Bill Longley is probably the fastest there is. I don't know nothing about that Tate feller, but I reckon the bounty hunter is hell on wheels with a six-gun when he's riled. He done fer Crow Wallace, and nobody ever took Crow fer a bargain.”

Lisa kept at it. “What about it, Mr. Archer? Is it to your liking that a dozen women will be made widows in one afternoon?”

For a while the room was quiet but for the wind shuddering against the windowpanes and the quiet sobs of a pregnant young woman who was helped outside after declaring that she'd, “Suddenly come all over faint.”

The silence stretched and grew taut. It seemed that everybody present had lost the will to talk.

Finally Mayor York said, “Lisa, that will do.”

The girl glared at her father, defiance in her eyes. When she noticed strain cutting lines into his face and the defeated slump of his shoulders, she finally sat down.

“I will consider what has been said here tonight and decide on a course of action,” York said. “We'll meet again tomorrow morning at ten.”

It was lame and all present knew it was lame, but no one volunteered an alternative course of action.

Three skilled gunmen in one town at the same time were a force to be reckoned with and suddenly it seemed that Comanche Crossing had lost the will to take on such a power. As Lisa York had pointed out, the butcher's bill was too high.

Coming on the heels of the deaths of Harm, McPherson, and Miller the loss of a dozen more of its best and bravest would sound the death knell of the town.

After York declared the meeting over, the fifty or so people in the room huddled into small groups and discussed what had been said.

“What the hell is that?” a man standing near the window yelled.

Then people crowded close to him to see what he was seeing.

A black silhouette of something large was out there, standing still and silent in the lashing wind and sleet.

Bill Longley watched as folks from the town meeting spilled out onto the street, attracted by a wagon drawn by an exhausted pair of mules. A sleepless, restless man, he shouldered off a post and stepped to the edge of the hotel porch.

Tam Sullivan stepped through the door and stood beside him.

“A window-watcher like me, huh?” Longley commented.

“Man in my profession lives longer that way,” Sullivan said. “I make it my business to know what's going on.”

Longley glanced at the black sky. “Hell of a night.”

“Is the only weather in this country wind and sleet?” Sullivan asked.

“I don't know. My first time here.” Longley shivered. “It will turn to snow soon.” He looked back to the street. “They're getting a man down from the box.”

“I got a bad feeling about this. I reckon I'll go take a looksee.” Sullivan made a little bow and extended his arm. “After you, Bill.”

Longley thought that amusing. “I'd hardly shoot you in the back in front of all those people.”

“I don't think there's any way of telling what you'd do, Bill,” Sullivan said.

Longley adjusted the hang of his guns. “Damn, I just got my boots cleaned.”

“We all have a cross to bear. Lead the way, I'll be right behind you.”

“Yeah? Well don't get any ideas, bounty hunter.”

Sullivan grinned. “Me, Bill? Why, I wouldn't dream of putting a bullet into the back of your skull.”

 

 

The body lay facedown on the boardwalk and no one seemed willing to pull the arrow out of its back.

“Here, I recognize that ranny.” Clem Weaver lifted the dead man's shoulder with the toe of his boot. “Yup, it's him all right. His name is Dan Culp, runs with a feller by the name of Jack Flood. He was here in town for a spell afore we run him out.”

Mayor York nodded. “I remember him. Chicken thief as I recall.”

“And a damned nuisance,” Weaver said. “He should've been hung fer a pest years ago.”

“Apaches?” Tom Archer threw the question out to everybody.

Weaver shook his head and yanked the arrow out of Culp's back, bringing blood, flesh, and bone with it. After a while he said, “It's Ute. And it's a war arrow, judging by the strap iron head. If'n the savages had been hunting, they'd have used flint.”

“What the hell are Utes doing this far south?” York said. “They never come this far into Apache country.”

“Long time ago, they took a notion to mount winter raids against the Apaches. The Ute are friends with the Jicarilla and they know the young bucks like to hole up with their womenfolk and young'uns in the cold weather, then raid into Old Mexico come spring. That's how come the Utes figure December is a good month for hoss stealing.” Weaver nodded at the Culp's body. “And that's how come he's dead. Must've bumped into the Utes while they was out conducting business.”

“I say we mount a punitive expedition,” Archer said quickly, his anger showing. “Make those damned savages pay for killing a white man.”

The storeowner was met with blank stares and a stony silence.

Weaver said, “Tom, Ute warriors are fellers you don't want to tangle with. They're mean as hell and don't know when to quit.”

“Seems like you're on your own again, Mr. Archer,” Lisa York said.

Sullivan who'd been listening to the talk, wondered what she meant by that, then dismissed it from his mind.

Even at that late hour and in the middle of a sleet storm, she was so dazzlingly pretty that the big bounty hunter's breath caught in his throat. Amid the gray night, surrounded by gray buildings, torn by a gray storm from a gray sky, Lisa York burned like a candle flame that lit up the gray recesses of his soul.

He admitted to himself that he'd . . . no, not loved her . . . but certainly admired her from the first moment he'd seen her. But she'd never even glanced at him or acknowledged that he was alive.

He vowed to change that just as soon as he could.

“We'll bury this man in the morning.” Mayor York looked around him. “Jim, can we put him in your icehouse for the night?”

“Hell, no,” James O'Rourke, the saloon owner said. “I don't want him bleeding all over my ice.”

“Stick him in the livery,” Weaver said. “He'll keep pretty fresh in there, and I'll take care of his mules and wagon.”

“I bet you will, Clem,” declared a voice from the crowd.

The remark relieved the tension and for the first time that night people laughed.

Bill Longley turned away, a smirk on his face.

Sullivan followed him and caught the gunman just before he stepped back into the hotel. “Hey, Longley.”

The man turned, scowling. “What the hell do you want now?”

Sullivan stepped closer. “Let's say you didn't take a pot at me on my way to the train station.”

“Let's say I didn't,” Longley agreed.

“All right then, a person or persons unknown tried to cut my suspenders. Right?”

Longley looked bored. “If you say so.”

“Suppose the Utes have gotten the Apaches all riled up, and suppose it was an Apache who took a pot at me.”

“So what?”

“Might be a good time for you to leave town.”

“You trying to get rid of me, Sullivan?”

“Yeah. You're a bad influence.”

“You mind that Sutton-Taylor business down Texas way?” Longley said. “Jim and Hays Taylor and John Wesley Hardin and them?”

“The feud still going on,” Sullivan said. “As far as I know.”

“Yeah, it is. Worse than ever before. Anyhoo, a couple years ago, back in Yorktown, Texas, the army mistook me for one of the Taylor boys and came after me with a rope.”

“A travesty of justice, Bill,” Sullivan said, his face empty.

“Well, the month before I'd shot an uppity black in a town called Evergreen, and I figured the soldier boys was aiming to hang me for that killing.”

“Careless of them, Bill. Misleading a man like that.”

As though he hadn't heard, Longley continued his story. “The sergeant in command of the damned Yankee hanging squad had a better horse than mine and soon came level with me.” He drew himself up stiff and straight like a drill instructor. “‘Surrender,'” shouts he, “‘in the name of the law.'”

Longley relaxed his back and shoulders. “‘You go straight to hell,' says I, drawing my revolver, this one here in my right holster. I shoved the muzzle into the sergeant's side and blew his Yankee guts out.”

“You're a stern man, Bill,” Sullivan said, “when all is said and done.”

“Wait, there's a moral to this story,” Longley said. “Maybe a couple morals. One is that I don't pull the trigger until I know I can kill my man. That's why it wasn't me who took a pot at you. If it was me, you'd be dead.”

Sullivan opened his mouth to speak, but Longley held up a silencing hand. “The second is that I don't scare easy, so your Apache talk is falling on deaf ears. I'm gonna take this town, Sullivan, and all that's in it, so stay out of the way. Do you
comprende
?”

“I've got no friends in Comanche Crossing. What do I care?”

“Yeah, that's true, but all the same I saw you making calf eyes at that little York gal tonight.”

“Keep her out of it.”

Longley smiled. “I would if I could, but I can't. See, pretty Miss Lisa is getting hitched.”

“To whom?” Sullivan said.

“
To whom?
I like that. Very good grammar as befits a fine gentleman like yourself. Lisa York is getting hitched to my dear friend and colleague Booker Tate. The happy couple plan Christmas Eve nuptials and I will be Booker's best man and maybe even read from the Book.”

Longley coughed. “How's this. ‘
May your fountain be blessed and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you be captivated by her love.”
He grinned. “That's from Proverbs 5:18-19. My pa learned me that from the Bible when I was a younker.”

Sullivan was too stunned to speak. Beautiful Lisa York planned to be the bride of a savage animal like Booker Tate? It was beyond his understanding.

Longley's hands made pictures in the air. “Candles, pine wreaths, frost on the window panes, the blushing bride in white silk, her mama sniffing into her handkerchief and Mayor York all puffed up proud as a pup with a new collar . . . I can see it all.”

Finally Sullivan found his tongue. “Yup, Booker is a son-in-law to be proud of all right. When did Miss York say yes?”

“Oh, she hasn't yet, but she will.”

“You mean Tate hasn't asked her?”

“He hasn't even met her, but he saw her at a distance and right away started mooning over the little gal he calls his Miss Pretty. That's when I began to make wedding plans.”

A sense of relief flooded through Tam Sullivan. “Lisa York won't marry a violent, smelly brute like Booker Tate.”

“Oh yes, she will,” Longley said. “Trust me, she will.”

“You mean you'll force her?”

“A harsh word, Sullivan. I prefer to say that we'll persuade the young lady to give her heart to Booker. After a couple years and a few beatings, she'll learn to love him.” The gunman's eyes narrowed. “I've told you how it's going to be, so now it's time to back off. Just stay out of my affairs.” Longley turned on his heel and stomped toward the hotel door.

He hesitated, turned, and grinned. “Sleep tight. Don't let the Apaches bite.”

Sullivan heard the man's laughter echo until it he slammed shut his room door.

The sleet had turned to snow and the big bounty hunter watched pure white flakes fall onto the black mud of the street and disappear. His face troubled, he asked himself some hard questions. What if Lisa York came to him for help and asked him to make her problems his own? How should he respond?

He had no answers, nor did he seek any.

After all, he was only passing through.