Last Lawman (9781101611456) (10 page)

“Probably just a couple of punchers headin’ back to their spreads.” Spurr gave the bottle back to Gentry and replaced his spyglass in its sheath, then returned it to its saddlebag pouch. “We’d best get to bobbasheelyin’ after Mason.”

When they’d ridden up the trail a ways, Spurr said, “How’d you an’ Bill get involved in this mess, Ed?”

“Mason sent us a telegram over to Buffaloville, where we been tryin’ to rustle us up some long loopers who been twistin’ the panties of some ranchers over there. We rode over to Willow City the next day, picked up Mason, and started trackin’ them Vultures west through the Stony Butte country. That’s where the two Pinkertons were waitin’ on us. Mason had sent a telegram to their office up in Thunder City, and ole Bryan Rand sent them two—Strang and Mitchell—because the Vultures been puttin’ a nice dent in their business, don’t ya know.”

“I do know.”

“Web ain’t so bad for a Pinkerton, but you can take that Calico Strang and hang him from the nearest tree.”

“I’d like to take Strang.”

Gentry chuckled, then he shook his head. “Willow City’s a damn mess, I tall ya, Spurr. Them Vultures killed Mason’s entire posse. Hanged the hangman.”

“So I heard.”

“He didn’t even ask any of the citizens up there to posse up this time. I don’t reckon it woulda done any good. Shit, you ride through there, you can still hear the women cryin’ and the little ones squallin’. Awful damn mess. Never see the like since you and me put the kibosh on that land war up in Dakota—what was it, three, four years ago?”

Spurr laughed as he and Gentry angled around the base of a flat-topped butte. “More like eight or nine, you old wildcat!”

“Can’t be that long!” Gentry said, rolling his brown eyes toward Spurr in expasperation.

Spurr just laughed and changed the subject. “Is Mason
on the Vultures’ trail? I sure ain’t pickin’ up any fresh sign this way.”

“We lost it yesterday. Came on down this way to meet you, but we’re thinkin’ they swung west just north of where we picked you up. They’ll probably come out where the Cottonwood Valley meets the North Fork of Dead Woman Creek. We’re only two, maybe three days behind ’em. Sure is lucky you was able to get up from Denver so fast. Mason—he seems to fancy your trackin’ skills, though I done informed him I taught you everything you know.”

Gentry maintained an expression of exaggerated seriousness for about five seconds. Then he turned toward Spurr and stretched his lips back from his large, yellow teeth. One of his front teeth was capped, and it sparkled in the westering sun.

“You’re still so full of shit your eyes are brown,” Spurr noted. “But I’m obliged for that bourbon. I don’t know what it is, but a good label of busthead just invigorates this old devil!”

“Probably that and your visit with Mrs. Chandler.”

Spurr jerked a surprised look at his gray-bearded partner, who said, “I seen you through the window.”

“You know Mr. Chandler, do you?”

“This here is my stompin’ ground. Chandler was one of the paper collars in the Bighorn.”

“Is he a good man, Ed?”

“He’s got a closetful of silver-headed walkin’ sticks—I’ll give him that.” Gentry held Spurr’s gaze with a serious one of his own. “But I doubt he’d ever hit her with one of ’em.”

“Well, hell,” Spurr said, frowning pensively, pooching out his lips as he booted Cochise into a lope across a broad flat between rock-rimmed mesas. “I reckon he’ll do, then.”

White smoke curled up from a grove of cottonwoods along a creek about a hundred yards off the trail’s right side. Sandstone walls had risen along the trail, forming a canyon about a half a mile wide. It was dusk here in the canyon though the sky above it was still blue. The tops of the canyon walls shone golden with the waning rays of the west-falling sun.

Spurr scrutinized the ground. Mason’s gang of four had left the trail here, and the prints of the shod hooves angled off through the rock and sage toward the smoke.

“Well, he finally stopped,” Gentry said. “I thought he was gonna ride all night.”

“I tell you one thing, Ed, ole Sheriff Dusty might have a giant burr under his blanket, but he won’t be pullin’ this kind of shit no more. Not if he wants me trackin’ for him he won’t.”

“If you say so, Spurr.”

“I say so!”

Spurr cursed and booted Cochise off the trail and along the tracks of the four shod horses. There was a small
escarpment off to the right, and from here came the sudden, loud metallic rasp of a rifle being cocked. Spurr turned to see Calico Strang grinning at him and Gentry as he lifted his bowler-hatted head from his nest near the top of the scarp.

“Show off,” Gentry muttered.

Spurr swung Cochise over to the escarpment and stopped, staring up at Strang still grinning down at him from his night guard position. “You might find yourself a better spot from which to keep watch,” Spurr suggested.

The smile faded from the young Pinkerton’s face. “What’s wrong with this one?”

“If you look to your right, you’ll see what.”

Strang turned his head to see the diamondback dropping straight down out of a hole in the scarp about even with the Pinkerton’s position. The snake’s head and about a foot of its stone-gray body were visible. In the faint pink light of the sunset, it flicked its forked tongue hungrily.

Strang jerked with a start. “Shit!”

“Likely a nest of ’em in there,” Spurr said.

Gentry chuckled.

Spurr said, “Keep your eyes peeled on our back trail. Two fellas been shadowin’ us. Don’t get excited when you see ’em, just make sure they know you see ’em.”

“Yeah…yeah, all right,” Strang said, still staring, hang-jawed, at the snake still slithering out of its hole.

As the young Pinkerton began scrambling around, looking for another night watch position, Spurr and Gentry gigged their horses toward the cottonwoods. Spurr could smell the smoke of cedar and cottonwood and the aroma of boiling beans.

“Hello, the camp,” he called when he saw the low flames dancing amongst the trunks, and the figures of Mason, Bill Stockton, and Web Mitchell hunkered around the cookfire. A pot was bubbling on a flat rock inside the fire ring.

The men’s horses were tied to a picket line off to the left
of the fire, just inside the cottonwood grove and near a shallow ravine that angled along the backside of the grove toward the creek. The creek muttered in the distance—a cool, pleasant sound. The air was cooling now, too, as the sun quickly fell.

Spurr did not feel cool, though. He was hot with anger at Mason’s way of going after the Vultures. When he saw the state of Mason’s horse—the beast was obviously blown, standing hang-headed and droopy-eyed at the picket line to which it was tied—he was even angrier. Mason was not a tinhorn. Spurr knew that from having ridden with the man. The sheriff took himself too seriously most of the time, and he had little sense of humor whatever, but he was too good a lawman to let himself get goaded into a bear trap like this.

Spurr and Gentry tended their horses, letting them cool and rubbing them down before leading them over to the creek to draw water. When both horses had had their fill, the two men grained them and tied them to the picket line with the other four, where grama and bluestem grew around the cottonwoods. Then they hauled their gear including their sheathed rifles over to the fire.

Mason sat on a rock, his hat on the ground beside him, his cup in his hands. He did not look up as Spurr and Gentry approached and threw down their gear. The others—Stockton and Mitchell—nodded as they smoked or sipped their coffee, but no one said anything. It was a grim crew.

Spurr consciously cooled himself. When dealing with a prideful son of a bitch like Dusty Mason, whose icy demeanor had a fiery flipside that Spurr had seen explode a time or two down in Colorado and New Mexico, it was wise to carefully choose one’s words.

He didn’t say anything until he and Gentry each had a cup of coffee and were sitting on a log on the creek side of the fire from Mason and Web. Stockton lay back against a
tree, hat off, ankles crossed, a long, thin black cheroot smoldering between his long, knob-knuckled brown fingers.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Spurr said over the rim of his smoking cup to Mason, “if this was a horse race, you’d have won you a new saddle and the first dance at the do-si-do with the mayor’s plain-faced daughter.”

Mason was like a scolded but stubborn child. Fidgeting uncomfortably, he glanced up at the sky that was spruce green and then at the creek beyond Spurr and Gentry, and then he said, “I should have brought a spare. We all should’ve.”

“Well, we all didn’t.” Spurr saw he wasn’t getting anywhere trying to be subtle. Still he kept his voice low, reasonable. “You blow out your horse, you’re on foot out here all by your lonesome. None of us is gonna ride double with you, Dusty.”

“I realize I been foggin’ a little hard, but those are killers we’re after. A horse is a horse.”

“Not out here it ain’t, and you know it. It’s all that stands between you and the grave.”

Now Mason let his gaze stray to Spurr, who held it. An uncomfortable silence fell over the bivouac. The fire crackled and popped and the bean pot bubbled, juice dribbling down over the sides and sizzling on the hot coals beneath it.

Web finally dismissed himself, saying he had to take a piss. He drifted off over to the creek. Stockton said he was going to check on the horses. Gentry merely sat back against a log and rolled a smoke. He knew both Mason and Spurr and didn’t feel he had to go anywhere while the old bull and the young bull locked horns.

In fact, a referee might be necessary.

He drew a deep, fateful sigh as he rolled his quirley closed.

Spurr finally said, “I know what’s eatin’ you about this, Dusty.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re alive.”

Mason stared at him. The hardness of his eyes softened just a little, and he swallowed.

Spurr nodded.

Mason turned to stare off to his left, then lowered his head and ran his hand through his thin brown hair that was swept back from his sharp widow’s peak pale as flour compared to the redness lower where the sun had reddened his face.

“Don’t make sense,” Mason said, keeping his head down and massaging his neck. “They killed Bone and all the posse members, left their women wailin’, and they hanged poor ole LaForge. Clell was about to pop a cap on me when someone shot at him from a rooftop.” He looked up now, shuttling his openly befuddled gaze between the two older lawdogs on the other side of the fire from him. “For the life of me, I don’t know who that was. I got no idea who saved my hide. Or why.”

“A townsman with a rifle,” Spurr said.

“I don’t think so. I couldn’t see much of the man, but from what I could see, I don’t think I’d ever seen him before.”

“What’d he look like?” Gentry asked.

“I don’t know.”

Spurr glanced at Gentry. The territorial lawman glanced back at him, a gray brow faintly, skeptically arched.

“Ah, hell,” Mason said, growing impatient with the conversation. “Don’t matter who he was. He saved my bacon, that’s all. Maybe I do know him. He was a long ways away. Maybe he just didn’t want anyone to know who he was should Stanhope find out and do to him what they done to the posse.”

“That’s probably it,” Spurr said.

“Shit, I’m hungry,” Mason said, his disgruntlement over the whole affair aggravated by the fact that he owed his life
to some stranger. He set his cup aside and dug a tin plate and a spoon out of his saddlebags. “I don’t care if these beans is done or not. I’m eating.”

After Spurr, Mason, Gentry, Stockton, and Mitchell had all eaten, the dark night settled like a black glove though stars were smeared like flour across the sky. A high-country chill laced the air. The creek seemed to murmur a little louder than before in the cooler, denser air, muffling the distant yammering of coyotes.

When Spurr had come back from washing his plate and fork in the creek, he stowed the utensils in his saddlebags, then slid his rifle out of its elkhide sheath.

“I reckon I’ll go relieve Calico,” he said.

Calico himself replied with a yell from somewhere out beyond the fire: “Two riders ridin’ in!”

Spurr glanced at Gentry, then stepped wide of the fire and leaned his left shoulder with feigned casualness against a tree. He levered a live round into his Winchester’s chamber, then slowly lowered the hammer to half cock.

Mason rose from where he sat by the fire, as did the others, Gentry unholstering his pistol, Web and Stockton grabbing their rifles. They all spread out to the edges of the firelight, so they could see better into the darkness out by the trail they’d ridden in on.

An anxious hush fell over the camp, the fire snapping, an occasional spur chinging. Stockton puffed his cheroot. Hoof clomps sounded. They grew louder, the slow plodding of walking horses, until Spurr could see the two riders moving toward him slowly. Doubtless, these were the two men he’d spied on their back trail.

“That’s far enough,” Mason said, keeping his voice low.

The riders lifted their hands to their shoulders, drawing back on their horses’ reins. The horses blew and snorted. One of the tied horses whinnied and the horse of the newcomer on the right answered in kind.