Last Lawman (9781101611456) (3 page)

A couple of the mounts whinnied as they galloped on down the draw and along the base of the escarpment and out of sight, the rataplan of their hooves dwindling quickly.

Spurr wheeled and ran south. The draw’s southern bank was little more than a gradual incline studded with cedars, rocks, and yucca. There were many large, pale boulders that had likely tumbled down from the main escarpment on Spurr’s left, offering cover.

He’d heard the outlaws begin shouting again just after
the Appaloosa had loosed its warning whinny. Now the shouts were growing louder, and as Spurr crouched behind a boulder and stretched a look around it toward the cabin, he saw why.

The outlaws were running toward him, strung out to either side in a shaggy line, brightly colored neckerchiefs billowing, bandoliers winking, broad-brimmed hats shading their faces. All four.

Philpot was the second man from the left. They were about halfway between Spurr and the cabin, about sixty yards away and closing fast. The frantic looks on their faces betrayed their worry about the horses. Men on foot out here in the remote Jicarillas were coyote bait. If thirst or rattlesnakes didn’t get them, the wolflike Jicarilla Apaches would.

“Stop and throw down your guns!” Spurr shouted as he rose up from behind his cover.

Not giving the killers time to stop or throw down their guns—they hadn’t given Kenny Potter time to crawl for cover—he pumped a round through Philpot’s right knee. The outlaw ran another two yards, stretching a look of anguish across his face while reaching for his leg. He hit the ground and rolled, howling, losing his hat and his rifle. He came up on his ass, clutching his knee with both hands, red-faced with fury, eyes nearly popping out of his hairless head.

The others ran to skidding stops, kicking gravel up around their knees and raising their rifles. Spurr had ejected the spent cartridge from his Winchester’s breech. He aimed quickly, and the Winchester roared like near thunder. Vernon Drake stumbled backward and twisted as he fell a half second after his own shot had sliced through the slack of Spurr’s deerskin vest and carved a hot line along his left side.

Spurr cocked and fired again, again, and again, until all four of the outlaws were down and howling. Through his own wafting powder smoke, the old lawman saw Philpot crawling back toward the cabin, sort of leapfrogging while
clutching his bloody knee. Spurr was about to draw a bead on the killer, but then he saw one of the other three—the man farthest to Spurr’s right—leap to his feet and dash toward a boulder at the edge of the yard.

Spurr fired hastily, his shot plunking into the ground several yards behind and beyond the big man in a black-and-white checked shirt, red bandanna, and patched denims, whom he recognized as the half-Comanche Alvin Silva. Silva dove behind a large rock. As he lifted his head, Spurr levered another shell into his Winchester’s breech, aimed more by instinct than sight, and fired.

Silva’s head jerked back sharply, as though he’d been punched hard in the face. His head wobbled forward, and the sun glinted off the ragged hole that Spurr’s .44 round had punched through his face, just to the right of his long, hooked nose. Silva had not hit the ground before Spurr swung his Winchester back toward the cabin to which Philpot was approaching like a giant, wounded frog.

As the gang leader ran to within ten yards of the open back door, Spurr fired twice, empty cartridges winking over his shoulder. His first shot plunked into the back of Philpot’s left thigh, evoking another shrill scream. His second bullet slammed against the adobe-brick wall left of the door with an angry crack.

Philpot threw himself through the open door, mewling. As the outlaw twisted around, reaching for the door, wide-eyed and red-faced, Spurr triggered his Winchester and cursed as the hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

He caught another glimpse of Philpot’s bald head and bearded face as the outlaw slammed the door closed in its frame.

“Fuck you, old man!” The indictment was muffled by the closed door.

“I may be old,” Spurr said, striding forward while plucking .44 cartridges from his shell belt and sliding them through the gate in the Winchester’s receiver, “but I ain’t
fixin’ to meet my maker like you are, you cold-blooded son of a bitch.”

As Spurr continued striding toward the cabin and loading his long gun, Philpot slid his head into the open window right of the door, so that Spurr could see half of his face. “What if I give up?” the outlaw leader cried, his blue eyes flashing his fear.

Spurr shook his head. “I’d like to help you there. Too late. When you killed that boy, you killed your chances of seein’ what tomorrow looks like.”

Philpot angled a long-barreled pistol out the window. It flashed and thundered, smoke wafting from its maw. Spurr ignored the bullet spanging off the ground ten yards behind him. The old, bandy-legged deputy U.S. marshal kept walking, shoving an eighth shell into the Winchester’s breech, pumping one into the chamber, then shoving a ninth through the loading gate.

“Spurr!” Philpot cried. “I’m wounded bad! I’m givin’ myself up, ya hear?”

Spurr stopped. Philpot’s entire face was in the window’s lower right corner, as though he were kneeling on the floor. His eyes were bright, mouth stretched wide, showing his two silver-capped front teeth. Tears dribbled down his brown-bearded cheeks.

“A few years ago, I’d have honored that request,” Spurr said. “And I’d likely have shunned any lawman who’d do otherwise. Now, as old and stove up as a thirty-year-old whore, I am one of them that’s gonna do otherwise.” Spurr chuckled wryly and shook his head. “Ain’t that just a bitch, Philpot?”

“Spurr!” the outlaw screamed, poking his pistol out the window again.

Spurr raised his rifle and fired a quarter second before Philpot’s revolver belched, blowing up sand and gravel five feet in front of Spurr’s moccasins. The gun dropped to the ground in front of the window as Philpot screamed still
louder and flew back into the cabin, clutching the bloody hole in his right shoulder.

Spurr could no longer see the outlaw, but he could hear him scrambling around inside and sobbing, his boots thumping, spurs trilling on the earthen floor. Spurr walked up to the closed door and rammed his rifle butt against it twice near the steel-and-leather latch before the locking bolt broke and the door swung wide on its creaky hinges.

As the door banged against the wall, Spurr raised his rifle to his shoulder. Philpot had just staggered out the front door and into the yard, stumbling over his boot toes.

Spurr lowered the Winchester slightly and walked through the cabin that reeked like an old goat in late August. Philpot continued staggering into the front yard, both his wounded legs stiffening up on him.

“Turn around or take it in the back, Philpot!”

Philpot dropped to his left knee, the other leg stretched out behind him. He rolled onto a hip and looked up at Spurr, his eyes pinched with pain and terror. He threw up his hands in supplication.

“You can’t shoot an unarmed man, Spurr.”

The old lawman ambled on through the cabin and out the front door. As he lowered the rifle to his side, Philpot’s bearded cheeks slacked in a slight show of relief.

Spurr stopped six feet away from the kneeling outlaw. He glanced over to where Kenny Potter lay dead near the well, his curly hair crusted with dried blood. Rage boiled anew in the old man’s veins, and he raised the rifle, aiming down from his right cheek.

“Wanna lay odds on that?”

Philpot’s lower jaw dropped, and his eyes widened.

Boom!

“Please don’t kill me, Sheriff. Oh, god…please don’t kill me! I’ve had a change of heart—I really have!”

The killer’s plea echoed around the Laramie County courthouse—at least that wing which housed the Brule County sheriff’s office and jail. Sheriff Dusty Mason sat kicked back in his chair, spurred boots crossed on his rolltop desk. A wry half smile shaped itself on his broad mouth mantled by a brushy, dark-brown mustache as he slowly, methodically rolled a quirley and stared out the dusty window before him.

On Willow City’s dusty main street, Cheyenne Street, the workmen were putting the finishing touches on the gallows that would hang the man whose false pleas Mason had been enduring for the past half hour.

“Give it a rest, Clell,” the sheriff said, twisting the quirley closed. “Your caterwaulin’s fallin’ on deaf ears. In a few minutes…” He glanced at the old regulator clock ticking on the pine-paneled wall behind him, beside a large, framed, government survey map of Wyoming Territory. “Twelve
minutes and thirty-two seconds to be more precise. The hangman, Luther LaForge, likes things precise, don’t ya know. We mustn’t be late!”

From the jail block on the open balcony above Mason, the notorious bank robber and pistoleer Clell Stanhope shook the door of his barred cage and screamed, “Please, Sheriff. I really
mean
it! Ahh, lordy, I do!”

He sobbed and snorted, sort of mewling like a trapped coyote trying to chew its leg off. “I’ve had a change of heart. I don’t wanna die. Please fetch the judge back and tell him I’ll confess all my past evil doin’s, and I’ll tell you both where the rest of my gang’s holed up so’s you can go out and fetch ’em in!”

Mason chuckled as he leaned forward and scraped a sulfur-tipped match to life on his desktop.

“Come on, Mason—hear me out! Ya’ll think we’re in Wyoming. But you got another think comin’. We’re down in Colorado.
Southern
Colorado!”

“
Southern
Colorado’s big country.” Mason blew a smoke plume at the dusty, sunlit window beyond which the hangman, Luther LaForge, dressed in a bow tie and black clawhammer coat with a Lincoln-style opera hat on his coyote-like head, was strolling around the gallows, pointing details out to the three workmen giving the platform its finishing touches.

One man stood atop the gallows, adjusting the hangman’s knot that would soon encircle Clell Stanhope’s thick neck. Another was testing the trapdoor lever bristling from the platform’s near side, opening and closing the door beneath a sandbag weighing the same as Stanhope himself.

A sizeable crowd had already gathered around the gallows—men, women, children, and dogs. Even a few chickens and someone’s pet coyote. A Mexican woman and her son were hawking burritos while Burt Givens had set his beer keg on the broad porch of his establishment, the Brule House Saloon and Pleasure Parlor. He was filling
mugs with his frothy ale while men crowded around, handing nickels to his best whore, the voluptuous and scantily clad Trixie Tate.

Trixie was really working the crowd, laughing, rattling the coins in her beer glass, funning with the men, and ruffling the hair of several lucky patrons while leaning forward to show her bosoms bulging up like small, pale mountains from her deep purple corset.

“You fetch the judge and have him change my sentence to life in the pen, Mason, and I’ll tell you exactly where the hideout is. Oh, Jesus, god, look how they’re funnin’ out there, gettin’ ready to see me hang!” Stanhope mewled some more and sniffed and snorted before adding, “You fetch him and have him throw me in the pen. Hell, I’ll work the rock quarries for the rest of my days. I’ll blow railroad tunnels! I just don’t wanna die, Mason. Please! You gotta listen to me, Mason. You gotta understand.”

“Be tough, Clell. Be tough as the hombre who rode in with his gang and robbed the Bank and Trust a month ago and shot Dave Tully and Homer Simms dead in the street.”

Mason had led a posse out after the gang who called themselves the Vultures. They’d split up somewhere in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, though it might have been western Dakota; it was hard to tell just where a fellow was in those brutally hot, dry, rattlesnake-infested buttes north of the Platte.

Mason and the posse had run Stanhope and two other Vultures down after a long, hard chase. They hadn’t been hard to capture, however, as all three, including Stanhope, had been wounded in their getaway from Willow City and were more like cornered coyotes than angry wolves. They’d stopped to have their wounds tended by an old Hunkpapa woman at a trading post on some nearly dry creek that Mason hadn’t learned the name of, and that’s where his posse had found them.

The rest of the gang, though, had gotten away. Mason
figured they’d headed on back out to western Wyoming, where, according to a string of consistent rumors, the curly wolves had a hideout, likely somewhere in the badlands along the Green River or up in the Wind River Range.

“Yeah, I was tough,” Stanhope said. “You got that right. I’m a cold-blooded killer. But I reckon I’m one o’ those killers who, when I’m gettin’ ready to cash in my chips, I start squirtin’ down my leg. Sure, I’m ashamed of it. But,
damnit, Mason—I’m scared o’ dyin’, and I’m offerin’ you an option here
!”

Mason glanced up to see the big outlaw in a red bandanna and with two black vultures tattooed on his cheeks, above a thick, dark brown beard, press his ugly face against the cell and rattle it until Mason could feel the vibration throughout the entire two-story office. The desperado’s right arm was trussed up in a burlap shoulder sling. Stanhope had been taking a midnight crap in the outhouse flanking the trading post, groaning from the pain of his wound, and Mason had simply shoved his rifle barrel between two of the structure’s brittle boards and pressed it hard against the back of Stanhope’s neck.