Dead Warrior (7 page)

Crushing my nebulous plans for a breakaway, once open country was reached, a couple of riders were waiting just outside of town. Clinker then mounted to the driver’s seat beside me. Of Barringer I saw nothing until we had reached the Socorro road and, after making westing, had swung back south along a barely discernible set of tracks. He was waiting by the abandoned mine shaft to which they led.

The old wooden hoist above it looked like a gallows looming against the reddening dawn, and I learned that Barringer thought so, too. “We’ll hang them from that, drop them in
the shaft and heap tailings on top,” he told Clinker. The gambler had the sickish look of a man getting ready to lance his own boil, but he tried to be jocular. “Ladies first.”

None of them liked that part of it. “Why don’t you just shoot Sparks and let her get lost?” one of the escorting riders asked.

“I’m only stretching Roy because we might as well save a bullet since the noose’ll be ready,” Barringer snapped. “But she’s the one that matters, you damn fool. She’s too well known, she’s got tough friends and she’s smart. She could have us run out of the territory, and the same thing would happen if her murder is pinned on us. Now shut up and get busy.”

“Well, I don’t know as I want to see it,” Clinker said. “We’ll be busy turning the stage around.”

“You damn well will see it,” his chief told him. He wore his gun slung from his belt now, and his right hand dangled near it. “Why do you think I’m insisting upon hanging anyhow? You’re getting your cut out of the twenty-five thousand we got, mostly from her bank, and you’ll have as much of a hand in the dirty part of it as the rest of us. And I mean a hand, too — your fist around the rope.”

The outlaw inside the stage then dismounted, hauling the faro lookout after him. The latter fell and rolled face down on the ground. Miss Tandy, though also bound and gagged, managed to keep her feet after stumbling forward a couple of steps. Roy Sparks was then jerked erect, and both were hustled toward the hoist.

One of the riders had unslung a lariat from his saddle and was in the act of tossing it over the crossbar. The rest stood watching, the other four executioners standing tall in their boots, Sparks bent over as though stove in, and the erect young woman. The latter’s curiosity proved to be more diversified,
though. Above the cloak which swathed her I saw her head turning everywhere. At least twice while taking her last look at the world, her eyes rested on me.

I knew what she was doing because I would soon be doing it, too. The plans for my own disposal seemed clear enough. I would be used to drive the coach in which Dolly Tandy was known to have left town away from the bodies in the mine shaft. At some point I’d be shot and left as the victim of a holdup, leaving the question of what happened to the girl as something for mystery lovers to argue about.

Meanwhile nobody was paying any attention to me. There was reason behind this carelessness; for I could not flee without turning the stage around, nor proceed because of a steep slope not far ahead.

I could have made it afoot for a ways, it is true, and my instinct was to take the chance of being able to outmaneuver them amongst the surrounding boulders and ledges. Yet I did not try it, because the thought of Blackfoot Terry came between me and the yearning for survival. The only knowledge I had left was that I could not attempt to escape at the price of deserting his friend, or whatever Miss Tandy was to him, so
I
stayed hunched on the driver’s seat.

From where I squatted, as lost to action as a man in a coma, I looked down with loathing not only on what I was seeing but on myself. Whether the evil to which I was witness or my own helplessness in the face of it was worse I did not then have the clarity of mind to determine. A dead man, I watched murder in the making, because I could not look elsewhere.

Yet there is a difference between a planned execution and killing in hot wrath. Where violence does not spring from passion it must lean on some degree of formality, and that fact found realization now. Charlie Barringer had always
talked like a man of some education, even if he had eschewed anything resembling manners. When he turned to Miss Tandy after the hangman’s knot had been tied, however, he took off his hat when he addressed her.

“I’m sorry you got caught in between Courtney and me; but you had warning, and I can’t let you go. Is there anything you’d like to say before you step off?”

At the end of her nod of assent, she looked straight at me once more. When the gagging neckerchief had been removed from her face, though, she gazed from one of her captors to another before her eyes fastened on the man who had ridden as guard inside the coach.

“I see you have your shotgun,” she said slowly, “but there’s one thing that puzzles me. Why did you leave that rifle under the rear seat of the stage?”

Except for Clinker, none of them had known of the rifle’s existence. While they were still goggling at her as though they thought fear had addled her mind, I hit the ground on the far side of the vehicle.

In the accidia of hopelessness I had forgotten about the weapon, which still would have been of no use to me if I had had to waste time in searching. It was where she said it was, I saw when I yanked open the door, but on the opposite side. I had to scramble in before I could reach it, and by that time feet were pounding toward me. Another precious moment was lost because the curtains were lashed down, and I had to move to the door, left hanging open after the captives had been forced out.

The outlaws were all on the move toward me, with Clinker, trying to compensate for his blunder, in the lead. Five feet away, he got off a revolver shot which nicked my ear. When my rifle kicked, one of his ill-matched eyes disappeared, and then the cloud of black powder hid his whole face from me.
He kept going forward, though, and didn’t collapse until he bumped into the hind wheel of the stage. We were rolling away from him, for the horses had lurched into action at the sound of the shots. It was their promptness in doing so which spoiled the aim of the man with the shotgun. Instead of finding me, the slugs ripped the curtain of the window to my left.

The coach jolted and swayed as it wheeled over rocks and hollows, so that I could do nothing but brace myself to avoid bone-shattering injury. Fortunately for this purpose, my frantic horses soon got into difficulties. A hundred yards from the mine shaft, they found a ledge they couldn’t negotiate and jammed the wheels when they tried to swing away from it.

Pitched out the open door by the shock of that halt, I fell on the side already burned by one of the bullets which had been sent through the stage before it was out of pistol range. I could feel my shirt sticking to the wound as I rolled over to rest my rifle on a rock.

Barringer and the two other horsemen were on the far side of the shaft, having just reached the horses they had left hitched to an abandoned ore wagon. The squat fellow with the shotgun was still moving in my direction, and so was Miss Tandy, scurrying along in his wake as fast as her cloak and bound arms would permit.

I had range advantage, and the shotgun lad showed his respect for that fact by diving for cover as soon as he saw me in position to fire. No doubt he had thought that the footsteps behind him were those of an ally. He wasn’t undeceived until Miss Tandy jumped on his back and kicked his weapon out of his hands.

The owner of the shotgun was of no mind to recover his weapon, what with me looking down his throat and shooting
from a rest, but the riders were coming on, pistols in hand. Having but four shots, I held off until Barringer fired at Miss Tandy. Bobbing in the saddle, he wasn’t accurate, nor did he make a good enough target for me. My first bullet missing him, I aimed at his horse and did better. When the animal fell, the gambler came over its head, landed on a pile of rubble and lay still.

The other riders gave up the charge then and circled back out of range. By the time they had done so, Miss Tandy joined me. She was exhausted and limping on the foot which had booted the gun. Except for the fact that she advanced to collapse right beside me, she gave no sign of recognition.

“Hey, you behind the rock,” I called out. It was possible that the man had a revolver, although I hadn’t noticed one on his person, so I walked forward slowly. “I’m coming your way,” I went on, “but if you’ll back out of there, I won’t shoot.”

As it turned out, he was way ahead of me. When he answered, it was from behind a rock ten yards in back of the one near which his shotgun lay.

“No foolin’?”

I watched him as he hustled in retreat, making certain he wouldn’t try to get Barringer’s revolver. After I had worked off Miss Tandy’s bonds, already loosened by her own exertions, I next got a box of cartridges out of the boot and set out to wind the situation up.

First bringing the shotgun to where the girl could use it in case of emergency, I secured Barringer’s pistol. It looked to me as if the gambler’s left arm was broken, but he showed signs of coming to when I relieved him of his gun belt.

One of the riders started to prowl, making motions toward cutting me off from the stage; but he stopped when I yelled at him and slapped the stock of my rifle. “Come and get
your boss when I leave,” I shouted, “or I’ll come back and shoot him out of his misery.”

Upon my withdrawal, they did come forward. Looking them both over, they boosted the groggy Barringer into one saddle and draped Clinker’s body in front of him. The former owner of the shotgun led the horse thus burdened, the two riders doubled up, and they all went slowly over the hill toward Midas Touch, with no banners flying.

The neglected faro lookout, who had previously done a thorough job of making himself inconspicuous, rose up and hurried toward us. He was still bound and gagged, but I had no time for him. Beside me I heard the sound of a woman crying while trying to conceal the fact.

THIS WAS A SITUATION I wouldn’t have known how to cope with even if I had been feeling good. I wasn’t. Reaction had left me shaky and nauseated. My ear was mourning for the chip of it that would never come back, my side felt as though it were pressed against a hot iron, and I had some bruises to show for having rattled around in the coach.

At the same time I thought I ought to make some effort on the girl’s behalf. I also felt a compulsion to shield her from the eyes of the man about to join us.

“Miss Dolly,” I said. It was a form of address I hadn’t used since leaving Maryland, but it now seemed in order. “Miss Dolly,” I repeated, when a twitch of her head told me she was listening. “Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable inside the stage?”

When I turned away after closing the door behind her, Roy Sparks was only a few yards off. Popeyed with the effort to talk, he was making uncouth sounds which I took to be requests for aid. A moment later I had obliged him, and he was flapping his arms to work the stiffness out of them.

“You done good,” he applauded me. He stamped his feet as though to assure himself that they touched terra firma. “If
you hadn’t got busy with that rifle I’d have sure been up there, meetin’ the buzzards halfway.”

“I’m not the one that saved you.” Whatever triumph I might otherwise have felt was smothered by the realization that it was not I who had been alert at the crucial moment. “I’d have been on the way to slaughter with a ring in my nose myself, if Miss Tandy hadn’t done the thinking for me.”

“She do think, don’t she; but you done the shootin’, and I ain’t forgettin’ what I owe you.” He had already put dull care behind and was as breezy as an end man in a minstrel show. “Say, when Charlie Barringer went sailin’ through the air like a chicken which ain’t got wings enough to fly, I nearly choked to death tryin’ to laugh through that bandanna they muzzled me with. I don’t suppose you got a drink cached in that wagon of yours, have you?”

There was the small end of a bottle in the boot, and if we had been alone I would have brought it out. As it was, I decided that if Miss Tandy had to pull her nerves together unaided, I could tough it out myself.

“We’re moving out of Barringer’s reach right now,” I told Sparks. “Are you coming west with us, or have you got other plans?”

“There’s a quid of tobacco in my shanty back at Midas Touch that I wish I had now, but I don’t want it
that
bad,” he said. “You got you another passenger.”

There were no sounds coming from the stage as I approached. “I think we’d better get started,” I said, when I had opened the door.

She was wan but otherwise composed. “Marylanders are supposed to be able to make horses run,” she added, after I had introduced myself. “Do it with my blessing and stop looking so worried about me. I was only crying because I was hungry.”

I stared at her and then chuckled. “You know that’s mostly what’s the matter with me, I think. We’ll shake some sort of snack together as soon as we’ve put mileage behind us.”

While I was maneuvering my team out of its tangle I noticed that Sparks stayed near the coach door. “What’s on your mind?” I paused to inquire.

He looked at me out of a tanned, mustachioed face that was both easygoing and calculating, knowing and foolish. “I figgered to ride with her to keep her company,” he told me.

“You won’t,” I snapped. “You’ll ride with me.”

He hitched his belt up to emphasize the fact that his shoulders were both wider than mine and higher from the ground. “Don’t tell me what to do, Shorty.”

It was the wrong time for him to say that. My spirits had been on the way back from the depths of relief and humility to which they had sunk. If I had earlier remembered what I had not done, I was by then recalling what I had accomplished. Among other things I had just killed a man who had come between me and my purpose, and the harsh satisfaction of the thought was so strong in me that I could taste it.

In my eagerness to grasp the chance to vent my snarl of emotions, I took several steps toward him, my hand fondling the stock of Barringer’s revolver. “Damn you,” I roared, “this is Shorty with a gun talking. You’ll do what I say, or you’ll be pitched in that mine shaft after all.”

That was no more than jangled feelings speaking, but Sparks was convinced. “You didn’t look that touchy,” he placated me. “Of course, the man that owns the stage has a right to do the seatin’, when you get right down to thinkin’ about it.”

Having cooled off, I was embarrassed about sharing a seat with a man I had threatened so drastically, but Sparks was above such petty considerations. He borrowed a cigar from
me, though to chew on rather than to smoke, and by the time we were wheeling at a fast clip down the Socorro road, he was keeping me informed as to all that passed through his mind.

“That Charlie Barringer ain’t a glad man about tanglin’ with us.” Somehow he had transferred himself into the action, although he accepted Miss Tandy and myself as allies. “He put a lot of store by that fellow Clinker we killed, and when we brought that bronco down, I think Charlie busted his arm.”

“It looked that way to me, too,” I nodded. “Still, Barringer got what he really wanted, which was money and control of the gambling back there.”

“He got money from us,” Roy conceded. “He got nine dollars and four bits from me alone; but I don’t know as he’ll have control of the gambling or anything else in Midas Touch from now on. You know what I’d do, if I was in his boots.

“I’d skedaddle,” my companion went on, after I had expressed ignorance. “Camps’ll stand for a lot, but when it comes to hangin’ a gal that ain’t done nothin’ but deal as tricky a game of faro as I ever see, they draw the line. When word gets back of what he tried to do to me and Dolly Tandy, he’d better be on his way, or there’ll be the quickest lynchin’ since the Can Can vigilantes hung Potluck Mulligan by mistake.”

“How did that happen?” I was incautious enough to ask.

“You ain’t heard about that?” Sparks spat out a loose fragment of the cigar and put the soggy end back in his mouth. “Well, Can Can was a hide hunters’ camp up in east Wyoming, back before the northern buffalo was killed off. The boys there made a lot of money while the hunt was good, but I don’t say all of ’em was always good theirselves. There was a real he-coon under every other hat, and there ain’t
nothin’ in the Bible against some of the things them fellows’d do, because they hadn’t been thunk up until buffalo hunters was whelped. Charlie Barringer wouldn’t ’ve been nothin’ but a outlaw’s chore boy in that camp.”

“How did you get along there?” I inquired.

“Nobody wants to tangle with the head rooster,” Sparks observed, “but other gents found trouble enough to go around. There was somebody killed by buffalo hunters most every night, and lots of time they done better than that. Well, I let it rack along that way for a while, and then I formed the Can Can vigilantes. I’m a little more easy-goin’ now, or things wouldn’t ’ve got out of hand in Midas Touch the way they done; but in them days I didn’t have no more use for wrongdoin’ than a she-snake has for shoes with silver buckles.”

Seeing a gadfly on one of my leaders, I reached for the whip. Practice had made me handy with the lash, and I succeeded in scaring off the tormenting insect without touching the horse.

“That was neat,” Sparks commented, before he went on. “Now old Potluck Mulligan wasn’t a buffalo hunter, as he never went lookin’ for nothin’ but bottles, and he never killed nobody as he couldn’t spare the time from drinkin’ to pick a fight that amounted to any thin’. So he was one of the most law-abidin’ fellows in Can Can, but every now and then he’d land in jail, because the marshal had to arrest somebody — to make a showin’, you know — and Mulligan was one of the only two gents in camp who’d sit still for it, the other bein’ Red Dog Grimes. Did you ever meet Red Dog, Baltimore?”

I had been wondering whether we had gone far enough to make it safe for us to halt for breakfast, but I concluded that we had better push on for a ways. “No,” I said.

“Well, he was the second-best drunk in Can Can but only
a run-of-the-mill horse thief, so I didn’t see why the vigilantes should bother him, and they didn’t want to theirselves at first. After a while, though, we begun runnin’ out of likely fellows to stretch, and I see somethin’ I’d noticed about vigilantes before.”

Not having had any experience with such voluntary law enforcement groups myself, I was mildly curious as to the nature of his findings. “What was that, Roy?”

“Now I’m not like that,” he informed me, “but you take the average vigilante, and once he gets to hangin’ folks, it’s like eatin’ peanuts. He can’t lay off, and if there ain’t nobody handy that really needs to be stretched, he’ll start lookin’ around for somebody that only kind of deserves it.

“Well — ” The coach careened to jam Sparks against me, and he had to claw his way back to his own side of the seat. “Well, when we run out of good stock at Can Can, I wanted to quit, but the boys begged for one last hangin’, so I says, ‘Okay; just one more, but who you goin’ to swing?’

“ ‘We’ll take Red Dog Grimes out of the jug,’ they says.

“ ‘He wouldn’t have took that horse they calaboosed him for this time if he’d ’ve been sober, it not bein’ a very good bronc,’ I says. Still I couldn’t think of nobody better to hang, so that night a few fellows went to fetch Grimes while the rest of us made for the big cottonwood just outside of town which we always stretched our men from.

“Now this Mulligan gent didn’t know what we was up to, Baltimore, bein’ drunk as usual. But him and Red Dog was pretty good friends on account of havin’ been in jail so often together, so old Potluck decides that the right thing to do is to take Grimes some drinkin’ liquor, and
he
goes to the jug that night.

“There wasn’t nobody to stop him, as the marshal was dealin’ Spanish monte for the jailer, so Mulligan takes the
key off the hook, walks into Grimes’s cell, hands him the quart he’s brung along — and then flops down on the floor and starts to snore. I got that part straight from Red Dog hisself, who said he got tired of it and walked out.”

Catching me in the act of looking back for signs of pursuit, Sparks waited until he had my attention again. “Well, Grimes timed it pretty good, for it was just about then that the vigilantes come along. There was only a candle in a tin can for light in the cell, and old Potluck was lyin’ there with his back to the door. He was still snoring, but he stopped right quick when the vigilantes jumped on him, throwed a sack over his head and tied him up. Then they hustled him to the cottonwood where me and the others was waitin’. Well, I took the sack off, so the prisoner could say his last words and all, and of course it turned out to be Mulligan instead of Red Dog.

“ ‘Where’s Grimes?’ I says.

“ ‘This is who we found in his cell,’ one of the crew which had gone after Grimes tells me, ‘and there ain’t no other in that there jail.’

“Them other vigilantes was so disappointed they didn’t know what to do, Baltimore, but I was thinkin’ fast. I’d promised ’em this hangin’, and I knowed that if they didn’t get it I’d lose my hold on ’em. I’d been runnin’ the camp too long to take to that idea, so I says, ‘Wait a minute, boys, there’s a way out of this.’

“ ‘How’s that, Roy?’ one of ’em says.

“ ‘Look,’ I says, ‘everybody in Can Can knows we figgered to have a hangin’ tonight, and we’ll be the laughin’ stock of Ooh-la-la Street if we misfire. All right then,’ I says, and with them words I jammed the sack back over Potluck’s head again, ‘Gentlemen,’ I says, ‘tried and true vigilantes found this criminal in Red Dog Grimes’s cell, so it’s only reasonable
to figger that he
is
Red Dog Grimes. Haul away, boys!’ So they all give a cheer and done it.”

While the ill-starred Potluck Mulligan was being hoisted into eternity in substitution for horse-stealing Grimes, I was turning the stage off the road. The breakfast we belatedly made in an aspen grove was nothing fancy, but we felt the better for it, as we pressed on into country which grew progressively rougher. In the meantime the sun got lost in the clouds which piled up above the sharp, barren hills.

The plan had been to spend the night in a town called Nutmeg, of whose existence I had learned from Roy. At an estimated fifteen miles short of this place, though, the clouds made good on their threat. For ten minutes the water came down like the tide coming in.

Such was the dryness of the climate that a half an hour after the sun again shone the clothes of Sparks and myself were no more than a trifle damp. As far as the road was concerned, the moisture but made the sandy surface easier to negotiate. Not so much could be said for the torrent which filled a so-called dry wash a mile or so farther on.

“It ain’t goin’ to go away until it’s all run into that crick,” Roy said. He waved his hand toward the line of trees which marked the course of a stream off to our right. “We’d ought to be able to get across by mornin’, though.”

For once he was dealing in facts, and I descended to report conditions to our companion in the coach. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to go any further now, Miss Dolly.”

“Not without wings,” she agreed, peering out at the thirty-foot stretch of rushing water. “I didn’t see how we could miss running into a flash flood.”

It seemed to me that she did not understand all the implications of our predicament. “Er — it looks like we’ll have to be here all night,” I apologized.

“Um-huhm.” She was looking over the terrain with a practiced eye. “Well, we’ve got water, good grazing for the horses and firewood over by the creek yonder. We couldn’t have found a neater place to camp.”

She turned out to be a good cook, making a far better job of preparing biscuits, coffee and the venison Sparks brought in than I could have done. Although we ate in the silence of the physically weary, she appeared thoroughly at ease. I was therefore astonished when she requested my revolver, as I was putting my blankets in the coach for her.

“I hope you know that — er — you’ll be all right,” I told her.

She flashed me an appreciative smile, then examined the pistol to make sure it had its normal load of five cartridges. “Thank you, Mr. Carruthers; but I sleep better if there’s a weapon handy.”