Last Lawman (9781101611456) (11 page)

Keeping his voice friendly but knowing that trouble could
be brewing, Spurr said, “A little dark out here. Name yourselves.”

The man on the left said, “Homer Willoughby and Tate Beauchamp from over Dakota way. Smelled the fire. We’re a little light, as the ranchers ain’t hirin’ in these parts till fall.” The voice sounded dull, depressed. His horse snorted again, shook its head, the bridle bit rattling in its teeth.

Knowing that if anyone of the group knew them, Spurr would, Mason gave the federal lawman a deferential glance.

“Sure, sure,” Spurr said. “We got some beans. Not many, and one of us ain’t eaten yet, but you can have you a couple o’ spoonfuls. Picket your horses over yonder. The creek’s got good water in it.”

“Obliged,” said the man on the right as they both swung down from their saddles, making the leather squawk.

Spurr didn’t get a good look at either man but saw only their silhouettes as they led their horses wide around the fire and through the trees toward the picket line. The other horses stomped and generally lifted a fuss in guarded greeting of the newcomers.

Cochise whinnied raucously, drawing back on his picket line, and Spurr walked over to calm the horse. The two newcomers tended their own mounts in silence. Neither looked toward Spurr. When they’d led their horses off to the creek, Spurr returned to the fire, and that’s where he was sitting, smoking on a log, when Willoughby and Beauchamp moved toward him through the trees.

They were both medium-tall men. They looked like typical drovers in work shirts, battered hats, and leather chaps over faded denims. Their eyes were dull. Their jaws were dark with beard stubble. Willoughby had a mustache and a stylish pinch of fur under his lower lip. Beauchamp walked with a slight hitch in his step—an old hip injury, most likely.

They both had gaunt, hungry looks, though neither really looked as though they’d missed a meal. They also both wore sheathed pistols tied to their thighs.

Willoughby’s eyes dropped to the badge pinned to Spurr’s vest. He stopped suddenly, as did his partner, who glanced at him curiously. Willoughby looked at the other men spread out around the fire, all holding guns though none actually aiming them at the newcomers. The guns were a precaution, not a threat.

Willoughby smiled in surprise, his eyes sparking in the firelight. “Well, I’ll be damned. Y’all are lawmen!”

Spurr studied him, trying to place him. He thought he and Beauchamp looked vaguely familiar, but he’d run into a lot of men across the West, not all of them bad.

“That a problem for you?” Spurr asked.

“No, hell,” Willoughby said, still grinning as he looked around at the other badge toters. “We got nothin’ against the law. Ain’t ridin’ crossways of it, anyways—if that’s what you mean.”

“No, hell,” echoed Beauchamp nervously, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “I reckon we know we’re safe here amongst these fellas—huh, Homer? Out here, you never know. We’d just as soon steer wide of most folks, but since we done lost our pokes to some cardsharp in Cisco up in the Mummy Range two days ago, I reckon we’re a little desperate.”

“Desperate for what?” Mason asked them pointedly.

“Why, food, of course!” Beauchamp said with a laugh.

Bill Stockton dropped his fist-sized chin and growled, “You ever hear of shooting your own?”

“Sure, sure, we heard of it,” said Willoughby. “Only neither of us can shoot fer shit.” He chuckled, rolling his eyes toward his partner standing beside him, just inside the sphere of flickering firelight. “Can we, Tate? No, sir. We’re cowpunchers, not market hunters. I for one carry a carbine but mostly just for show, so’s road agents’ll leave us alone. And my six-shooter—hell, I ain’t fired it in weeks and then it was only at a sidewinder slithering up to my hoss. Mostly, I just use it to pound coffee beans.”

Both men were grinning, showing chipped, yellow teeth.

“Help yourself to the beans, boys,” said Spurr, depressing his Winchester’s off-cocked hammer and leaning the rifle against a tree. “Just leave enough for that Pinkerton out guarding the trail, or he’ll likely start caterwaulin’ like a trapped polecat.”

Feeling more at ease, and understanding how these two had likely just stumbled onto some bad luck—hell, he’d done the same a time or two—he sat down on his log near the fire. The other lawmen all put up their guns and slacked back down into their previous places around the fire. Stockton and Gentry tossed the newcomers a couple of plates and three-tined, wood-handled forks and made room for them around the fire.

As the two walked past Spurr, Spurr caught a brief glimpse of Willoughby rolling a quick, shrewd glance toward him. It was so fleeting as to be damn near unnoticeable.

To anyone but a seasoned lawdog.

“Sure do appreciate this, fellas,” Willoughby said, instantly stretching his previous grin across his face.

“De nada,”
Spurr said.

At the same time, he snaked his right hand across his belly and unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of the Starr .44 he wore for the cross draw just left of his shell belt’s square buckle. He slid the popper from its sheath at the same time he saw Willoughby wheel toward him, hardening his jaws and steeling his eyes as he clamped a big, brown hand over the wooden grips of the Schofield .44 thonged on his right thigh.

Spurr bounded up off his log, raised the Starr like a club, and smashed it down hard across the side of Willhoughby’s head. The man screamed and dropped his gun and ran staggering across the fire. At the same time, Beauchamp twisted around quickly, a cocked Smith & Wesson in his hand.

Spurr’s pistol leapt and roared. Flames lapped from the maw. Beauchamp grunted and triggered his Smithy into the log near where Ed Gentry was still sitting, the lawman’s lower jaw hanging. He’d managed to clamp his hand over his holstered pistol by the time Beauchamp had stumbled across the fire, kicking burning branches every which way, and fell in a heap with his pants on fire, screaming, blood oozing from the hole in his chest.

Willhouby had dropped to his knees at the base of a tree.

“Goddamn, you miserable sons o’ lawdoggin’ bitches!” he wailed as he reached inside his denim jacket and hauled out an over-and-under derringer.

Spurr swung his Starr toward the raging would-be dry-gulcher but slackened his trigger finger when Dusty Mason’s Colt Army thundered twice, drilling one shot through Willoughby’s forehead, the other through his chest, punching him back against the tree and silencing his caterwauling forever. The derringer dropped in the dirt.

All the lawmen were standing now, boots spread, staring in awe at the two dead men. Beauchamp had knocked over the beans. The scattered branches burned. Flames licked up both of the screaming brigand’s legs and he kicked at them as though they were dogs that had grabbed ahold of his ankles. At the same time, he clamped a hand over the ragged, bloody hole in his chest.

“Help me!” he cried. “Please, god—someone get some water. Don’t let me burn, you bastards!”

Web Mitchell plucked the empty bean pot off the ground and yelled, “I’ll fetch some water!”

“Forget it.” Spurr extended his Starr and put the howling bushwhacker out of his misery with a well-placed shot to his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

Silence save for the cracking of the several small fires settled over the lawmen’s camp. The others looked at the two dead men, then at Spurr, scowling curiously. Running
foot thuds sounded from the direction of the trail, and Spurr turned to see Calico Strang run into the trees and stop suddenly, mouth agape, chest rising and falling sharply, his cocked rifle in both his slender, black-gloved hands.

“What the hell…?”

“That’s what we’d all like to know,” said Bill Stockton, straight-faced but chuckling incredulously.

“Horse thieves,” Spurr said. “Didn’t recognize ’em ’cause they used their own true names. Willoughby and Beauchamp. They was a part of a horse-stealin’ ring down in the Nations some years ago. I killed Beauchamp’s brother, Lyle, but couldn’t pin nothin’ on him or his cousin, Willoughby, so I had to let ’em go. Didn’t recognize either one till Willoughby gave me that little look of the devil just before they was about to help themselves to our beans.”

Mason shoved his Colt down into its holster with a snick of iron against leather. “They see you at the hotel yonder?”

“If they did, I didn’t see them. Most likely, they seen us from a distance and got after our horses but recognized me just now and decided to go ahead and bushwhack us all and get it over with before I recognized them.”

“I’ll be damned,” Gentry said, chuckling and staring down at the burning Beauchamp. “Can’t take you anywhere, can we, you old whore banger?”

Mitchell bounced the bean pot in his hand. “You mind if I fetch that water now?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” said Spurr.

When Mitchell had put the fires out and Mason and Gentry had built up their own cookfire again in its stone ring, Spurr threw back a long slug of Gentry’s tanglefoot and smacked his lips. “Shit, I was gonna take the first watch after young Strang here. But I reckon this miserable episode just frazzled my old, tender nerves like lightnin’ streakin’ along telegraph wires.” The craggy-faced federal lawman popped a nitro tablet into his mouth and washed it down
with another pull from Gentry’s bottle. “I’m gonna have to sit here awhile, get myself settled down.”

With that, he lay back against his saddle and pulled his hat brim down over his eyes. He was snoring inside of a minute.

Mason, Gentry, and Stockton snorted.

Clell Stanhope’s Colt revolver was so close to Erin Wilde’s right hand that it made her hair tingle and her heart flutter.

She looked down at it now as she rode on the back of Stanhope’s grulla, behind Stanhope himself, as they trotted across the flat top of a dusty mesa. She held on to the back of his cartridge belt to keep her purchase. The man himself repulsed her, and she only clutched him around his waist when they broke into a lope or a gallop or headed up a steep hill, when she was in danger of being thrown.

She stared at the gun, then at her hands. She needed only to slide her right hand a few inches across the small of the rawhider’s sweaty back to grab the revolver’s wooden handle and draw it from where it rested in the holster lashed to his thigh.

Erin’s heart quickened. It skipped a beat. She lifted her gaze to the man’s upper back; his black-and-red calico shirt was stretched taut across his shoulders. He’d lashed his duster behind his saddle. She’d grab the gun, his own gun,
and shoot him in the back with it. She wanted very much to watch him die slowly as payback for shooting her boy, Jim, as well as for the abuse he’d visited on her last night, her first night on the trail with the passel of snakes known as the Vultures.

But she’d settle for blowing out his heart through his back with his own sidearm.

She didn’t care what happened to her after that. The rest of the gang riding to each side and behind her and Stanhope would doubtless shoot her. She’d kill him and then she’d kill herself to deny the other brutes in the wolf pack the satisfaction of abusing her further before they slit her throat.

Erin couldn’t bear her racing heart any longer. She removed her right hand from Stanhope’s cartridge belt. Quickly, she flicked it down around his side to where the handle jutted from his thigh, the butt quivering in its holster with each pitch of the trotting horse. She’d rather shoot him with the shotgun, the same gun he’d used to blow that terrible hole in Jim, but it was out of her reach in front of him. She closed her hands around the pistol’s handle and, gritting her teeth harder, pulled.

It wouldn’t budge.

Just as she remembered that it was probably held in place by a strip of leather across the hammer and fastened to the holster itself, Stanhope closed his gloved hand over hers. He held her hand there atop the butt of his gun, pressing down hard until she groaned from the pain shooting up into her wrist and arm.

“Whoa!” the leader of the Vultures yelled, drawing back on the grulla’s reins.

He continued to press down harder on Erin’s hand as he stopped the horse in the trail. The others in the gang checked their mounts down, as well, as the dust wafted around Erin and Stanhope, stinging her eyes.

“Let me go!” she cried.

The man looked over his shoulder at her. His lips were
pursed. His eyes were coldly smiling. He curled his lip slightly as he pressed down harder.

“No!” Erin said, using her other hand now to try to pry his big, powerful, merciless hand off of her right one.

Suddenly, he lifted his hand from hers. She had no time to register relief before his elbow came up and smacked her face so hard that it snapped her head back. She found herself flying off the side of the horse. The trail came up to smack her hard on her left shoulder and hip.

She groaned from the dull pain of the blow in her eye, cheek, and jaw, and from the sharper pain in her shoulder and hip and ribs from her violent meeting with the ground. She sort of lay on her side, her left leg bent up under her hip, that shoulder pressed against the ground. Her dress was in tatters, and her legs were bare. Stanhope had taken her underwear and her shoes last night, when he’d forced himself on her. He’d torn her dress down the front almost to her belly. The dirt of the wagon trail they were following burned her legs and her feet.