Last Lawman (9781101611456) (31 page)

Spurr accepted the tray from her. “I’m gonna give it my best shot.”

“Any sign of ’em?”

He glanced to the east along the broad, darkening street. “Not yet. They’re out there, though. I can smell ’em.”

“Might be an overfilled privy on the windward side of town.” Della gave a disgusted expression. “What’d this territory ever do to rate those devils?” She reached up and placed a hand against the side of his face, caressing his ragged, dusty beard and leathery cheek. “You’re one of the good ones, Spurr. You be careful.”

“Best get inside now, Della. No tellin’ when they’ll show.”

She caressed him an instant longer, offered him a brittle smile, then turned and, holding her skirts above her feet, walked down the hotel’s rotting steps. Spurr watched until she was safely back inside the Overland Trail, then ducked through the gap between the boards over a window, relit his candle, and headed back upstairs. He sat back down in his chair on the balcony, tray on his knees, and dug into the succulent steak, smiling. Della had remembered how he liked it done.

He drank the whiskey mixed with water so as to keep him head about him, and ate the steak and fried potatoes and two large chunks of crusty, buttered wheat bread. When he’d swabbed the last of the steak juice off the plate with a last scrap of bread, he gave a belch and set the tray on the floor. He used his knife to sharpen a match, picked his teeth clean, then tossed the pick over the balcony into the street below and grabbed his rifle.

He looked around carefully. Near darkness had fallen, though small, dull streaks of red and gold flashed occasionally as the sun continued sinking behind the far western ridges. Stars kindled like lamps of a distant town. He raked his gaze carefully up and down the street, but seeing nothing there he retured his scrutiny to the east. The skin above the bridge of his nose creased.

He narrowed his eyes, felt his weak ticker increase its
beat slightly. Far out at a small notch in the hills, a feeble orange light shone. It could have been the light of one of the miners’ cabins scattered throughout the hills, but Spurr’s time-sharpened instincts told him it was the Vultures.

As the darkness thickened and the far light brightened, so that he could see the orange-yellow, saber-like flames as they danced, his resolve solidified. It was Stanhope, all right. He’d set up camp about a mile away—just far enough for his gang’s large campfire to be seen from town.

Just letting Spurr know they were out there. And that they were coming soon.

Spurr gave a steely grin. Frustration nagged at him. He had to fight it off. They’d come when they came and he couldn’t let Stanhope’s ploy get under his skin, because it was the fear, the terror that the gang loved to evoke. They didn’t want to just ride in a shoot and be done with it. No. They wanted to squeeze every ounce of menace they could out of this.

Spurr slacked into his chair, tipped his hat down over his eyes, and tried to sleep. He could only doze, waking to see that the stars had wheeled themselves into different positions. The eastern campfire remained—neither larger nor smaller. The air grew cool, downright cold, but the lawman held his position, as uncomfortable as it was.

Twice, he got up and walked around the ghostly quiet town, stretching, getting the blood moving. Then he returned to his balcony and dozed.

He was awake at dawn. He strolled around the town once more, checked on Della and Erin, both asleep in their rooms, then returned to the balcony. The fire faded as the sky paled. Just as the large red ball of the sun began bleeding up into the far eastern horizon, Spurr saw a line of riders moving abreast toward town. They grew gradually against the lightening horizon until Spurr could distinguish the riders from their horses, see the rifles bristling up around their heads as they rode with the butts pressed against their thighs.

Very gradually he could make out the colors of their clothing, see their various jackets whipping out in the wind, see their horses’ heads bobbing, the occasional clods of sod or small sage branches whipped up by their trotting hooves.

“Time to dance?” Spurr said aloud to himself, staring toward the gang. “All right, then—let’s dance!”

He picked up his still-three-quarters-full whiskey bottle and his rifle and moved off the balcony and through the room and downstairs to the broad, rotting porch. He took his time, conserving his energy. On the porch, he looked toward where the Vultures seemed to float toward him against the vast, pulsing scarlet ball of the sun. They were a hundred yards from the edge of town and closing slowly now, all heads facing Spurr.

The old lawman set his bottle on the porch rail, leaned his rifle against a post, and plucked the small burlap sack from the breast pocket of his hickory shirt, then shook a single pill into the palm of his hand. He tossed the pill into his mouth, held it beneath his tongue, then popped the cork on the bottle. Rolling the pill to the back of his throat, he took a pull from the bottle, washing down the tablet.

He sighed and smacked his lips, looked toward the oncoming riders once more, and took another pull of the bracing whiskey that set fire to his tonsils and rocketed lightning through his brain and his heavy limbs, awakening his tired heart.

He corked the bottle, set it down on the porch rail. He picked up his rifle, racked a round into the chamber, off cocked the hammer, and walked to the top of the porch steps. The Vultures were at the edge of town now, narrowing their cluster a little as they came on along the broad main drag, walking their horses now, the horses tossing their heads as though sensing the gravity of the situation before them.

Stanhope was in his position at the middle of the pack. A sawed-off shotgun dangled around his belly, but he held
a carbine in his gloved hands. His brother, thinner and a head shorter, rode to his right. Magpie Quint in his black hat and red vest rode to his left. Spurr recognized the others from their wanted circulars—Ed Crow, Hector Debo, who had a bloody bandage wrapped around his knee, causing Spurr to smile a little as he remembered the agonized grunt in the ravine last night; and Quiet Boon Coffey with his half-dozen bristling six-shooters including a silver-chased LeMat in a shoulder holster.

Spurr walked down to the street and turned to face the gang. Clell Stanhope, with those two dark tattoos on his broad, bearded cheeks, beneath his black top hat, drew his reins back in one hand and raised the other hand. He and the others stopped their horses about sixty yards up the street from Spurr. Stanhope smiled, turned his head to say something to the others, and then they all swung down from their saddles.

The horses were herded off down a break between two boarded-up buildings and then the gang spread out across the street, Stanhope in the middle once more. He lifted his chin to shout, “Spurr, you old bastard—you ready to finish this thing?”

Spurr stepped farther into the street, squared his shoulders, spread his moccasins, and set his rifle on his shoulder. “Just to be clear, does that mean you boys aren’t going to comply with my order as a deputy United States marshal assigned by Chief Marshal Henry Brackett to throw your guns down and submit to arrest?”

He heard them laughing, glancing at each other. Stanhope turned back to Spurr. “Yep,” the outlaw leader said. “That’s what it means, all right.”

“All right,” Spurr returned, holding his rifle across his chest. “Then I reckon we are indeed gonna finish this thing, you yellow-livered, child-killing, woman-abusing plop of hookworm infested dog
shit
!”

Stanhope’s smile was replaced by a scowl. The others
spread out on either side of him hardened their jaws, darkened their eyes, and racked shells into their rifle chambers.

Something moved to Spurr’s right, on the far side of the street, and the lawman turned his head quickly to see the half-breed, Yakima Henry, step out of an alley mouth. Henry’s blue-black hair blew about his hard-planed, saddle-leather cheeks. He held a Yellowboy repeater in one hand; the thumb of his other gloved hand was tucked behind his left suspender that was drawn taut against his broad chest and oak-hard belly clad in red-and-black calico.

He blinked his green eyes set deep in stony sockets as he stopped near a waterbarrel at the far side of the street. Spurr’s look was a question to which the half-breed replied with a shrug and a squint, “Don’t care for lawmen. Don’t care for most men of any stripe. But you’re one crazy-tough old bull, and it’s only right you got someone sidin’ you, Spurr.”

Spurr stared at him skeptically, then slowly nodded, inching up his measure of the man. “I’d admire to have you side me, Yakima.”

The half-breed walked out into the street, stopped about ten feet to Spurr’s right, and turned to face the Vultures.

Spurr and the half-breed walked toward the Vultures.

The Vultures walked toward Spurr and the half-breed, their eyes hard, faintly sneering beneath their hat brims, lips stretched in bearded or mustached faces. They all had their rifles across their chests, as did Spurr and his unexpected partner.

When the two factions were twenty feet away from each other, they all stopped at the same time, as though twenty feet had been the agreed-upon distance from which they’d start shooting. No one said anything. Stanhope curled his nose, chuckled, showing his teeth, the vultures on his cheeks taking flight, and then whipped his rifle out and down.

Spurr thumbed his Winchester’s hammer back and fired at the same time that Stanhope’s bullet tore across his upper arm. Spurr’s bullet was better placed, and the leader of the Vultures stumbled wildly backward, a shocked look on his face as he turned to see the bloody hole in his upper right chest, his rifle dangling in his suddenly useless arm.

Hell’s doors opened and the devil roared.

Yakima Henry snapped his own rifle up and fired, and the other Vultures did, as well, as Spurr himself dropped to a knee and ignored the searing burn of another bullet slicing across his left cheek and another pinching his low left side, just above his cartridge belt. Spurr’s Winchester leapt and roared, and he felt the vague pang of satisfaction as Ed Crow screamed and dropped in a heap, triggering his rifle straight across the street and into an already broken window.

Spurr’s third bullet blew a second hole through Hector Debo’s right leg, just above the killer’s bandaged knee.

Boom! Boom! Pop! Boom! Blam! Pop!

Men screamed and shouted amidst the exploding guns whose thunderous reports multiplied three- and fourfold as they echoed around the canyon-like street. Two more Vultures were punched back, arms and legs flying. Yakima Henry grunted as Magpie Quint’s carbine exploded, and the half-breed went spinning and dropping to his belly before jerking his head up and around and triggering a big, horn-gripped Colt in his right hand.

Three Vultures were down and not moving while the others now scrambled, limping, for cover, Clell Stanhope running toward an alley mouth on the south side of the street. Spurr dropped Lester with a bullet through the scrawny brigand’s right ear, then saw Magpie Quint down on his knees behind a stock trough, missing his hat, his faded red vest spotted crimson, bellowing raucously as he extended his Buntline Special toward Spurr.

The long-barreled popper lapped smoke and flames, and Spurr wheezed as a bullet plowed through his left thigh. He triggered his Winchester. Magpie flew back atop a boardwalk, then leapt to his feet and ran stumbling around the far corner of the South Pass City jail and marshal’s office.

Spurr ground his jaws as he heaved himself to his feet, placing his left hand over the hole oozing blood in his thigh. He looked around at the four dead Vultures—Lester Stanhope, Hector Debo, Quiet Boone Coffey, and Ed Crow lying
twisted and bleeding. Only Quiet Boone Coffey was moving, shaking like an autum leaf as he stretched his left hand across the dirt toward his LeMat. Spurr triggered his Winchester from his hip, blowing the man’s lower jaw off, then blowing the top of his head off. He turned to Henry, who was scrambling to his feet, blood oozing from several points on his body, his horn-gripped pistol smoking in his right fist.

He glanced at Spurr, his eyes wild behind a black tangle of hair. “Teach you to volunteer!” Spurr barked, spinning and running down the break between the jailhouse and a harness shop. “I believe I got Magpie on the run! Stanhope ran south with his tail on fire!”

“I’ll get him,” he heard the half-breed growl behind him as he limped down the gap between the buildings.

Over halfway down the break, Spurr slowed, pressed his right shoulder against the jailhouse’s cold stone wall. He continued forward, glancing down at the cocked Winchester in his hands. It dawned on him that he’d likely fired all nine rounds, and not wanting to risk having an empty rifle—it did feel awfully light in his hands—he set the Winchester down against the jailhouse wall and slid his Starr .44 from the cross-draw holster just left of his belt buckle.

He stared ahead, seeing only sage and gravel and bits of blowing trash behind the buildings on either side of him. As he continued forward, he saw a privy missing several boards and its door. At the rear corner of the jailhouse, he stopped, pricking his ears. Magpie had run down the opposite side of the jailhouse and was likely waiting for Spurr off the building’s far corner.