.45-Caliber Desperado (24 page)

He was a little too precious about himself, Mason was, but given enough experience, enough seasoning, enough humility, he'd make a good lawman one day.

Maybe even one as good as old Spurr himself . . .

Spurr snorted again at his own conceit. A hazard of the job, maybe. Or maybe the attitude you had to have to keep wearing a badge in the face of often insurmountable odds not unlike the ones, regarding the de Cava bunch, that he was facing now.

A sign took shape along the trail's right side, growing in size as Spurr approached. Mesquites and alders flanked it, hammered by the wind so that two branches fell as Spurr watched. He returned his slitted gaze to the sign and snorted at the lower one's warning against “hell-raisers,” and rode on, glad to finally be reaching the town.

Corrals and stock pens pushed up along both sides of the trail. Buildings materialized out of the blowing dust. Spurr could hear the shrill squawks of shingle chains up and down the broad main street.

Keeping Cochise moving, he saw a large building on the right—three stories tall with a broad front porch. He made out the words ORGAN HOTEL painted across the second story, and his pulse quickened as he angled the big roan in that direction.

He pulled up suddenly as bulky shapes half clarified in the dust. They were horses milling in front of the hotel. Not just horses. Horses and men. The men were filing up the hotel's front porch steps, saddlebags slung over shoulders, rifles in their hands.

One was being helped up the steps by a shorter figure in a serape. Spurr squinted his weary, sand-blasted eyes. The shorter figure owned female curves. Long hair blew in the wind.

Spurr stared at the hotel until the newcomers had all filed up the steps and gone into the saloon, leaving three men gathering up the reins of the horses and beginning to lead them on up the street. The whinnies of the storm-frightened beasts mingled with the bizarre howling of the wind and the raucous rattling of the shingle chains.

Spurr glanced back at Mason. The sheriff's eyes were closed, chin dipped to his chest, the wind smashing the crown of his Stetson nearly flat against his skull.

Spurr reached down and shucked his brass-framed Winchester from his saddle boot. He racked a round into the breech, lowered the hammer to half cock, then set the rifle across his saddlebows. He looked around, then neck-reined Cochise off to the left and into a broad gap between a corral and a barrack-like mercantile with a broad front loading dock. Mason's horse balked at the sudden pull, then trotted along behind the roan, Mason half asleep but automatically clinging to his saddle horn.

Spurr swung the horses around behind the buildings lining the main street, wanting to stay out of view from the hotel, and reined up when he saw a beefy man in an apron splitting wood between a small building on the right and a privy on the left.

He asked the man where he could find a sawbones, and the man said, his black hair around his bald pate blowing wildly, “Little white house at the other end of town. White picket fence. You can't miss it.” He shuttled his gaze from Spurr to Mason and then sunk his maul into a pine log, cleaving it cleanly in two. “Nicest place you'll find in this hellhole.”

“Hellhole?” Spurr said. “Last time I was in Diamondback, it was growin' from all the gold camps in the Organs.”

“Not no more it ain't,” the man said, hefting the ash-handled splitting maul in his hands. “The gold's gone, and the pilgrims done pulled their picket pins for the San Juans and the Sawatch Range. We're holdin' on by a thread here, amigo. When the stage switches its run, that'll be all she wrote.”

He glanced again at Mason. Spurr knew the man was curious about what had happened to the sheriff, but he'd lived out here too long to ask fool questions of strangers. Especially a couple of raggedy-heeled, unshaven lawdogs—one of whom had likely been shot—fresh from the high and rocky. He merely shook his head and sunk the head of his maul into another pine log.

Spurr rode on along behind the buildings of the main street until he came to the end of town and rode up to the little white house sitting neatly under cottonwoods and alders, a little buggy shed behind it, beside a privy with a half-moon carved in the door. The door was loosely latched and the wind was slamming it back and forth in its frame.

Spurr dismounted, ground-reined both horses, and went over to tug on Mason's shoulder. “Come on, Sheriff,” he yelled above the wind.

Mason pulled away and groaned.

Spurr tugged on the man's shirt once more. Mason jerked his head up, blinking and looking around. “Where . . . ?”

“We're in Diamondback. The sawbones is in yonder. Looks like he's done right well for himself, too, so maybe he's worth his salt.”

“Probably some cranky old drunk who only knows how to use a bone saw.” Mason let Spurr help him down from his saddle.

Spurr supported the man with one of the sheriff's arms around his neck as they pushed through the well-tended gate in the picket fence. They were halfway up the narrow cobblestoned walk when the front door opened, and a woman in a plain blue and white muslin dress walked out onto the gallery, pulling a white shawl around her shoulders. Spurr could see right away that the woman was about as well set up as the old marshal had ever seen—full-busted, with nice hips, long legs, and red-blond hair piled richly.

“The doctor in?” Spurr called.

“I guess you could say that,” the woman responded, stepping out and holding the screen door wide with both hands. The wind threatened to tear it from her grip.

Spurr led the heavy-footed, knock-kneed Mason up the three porch steps and on into the house that smelled of a meal cooking—a smell so rich and inviting that it almost drove Spurr to his knees. It made him feel lonesome, too, as most such smells tended to do to a man who so seldom enjoyed such domestic delights.

“What happened?” the woman said as she stepped into the foyer behind the two lawmen.

“Got a bullet in his side.”

The woman latched the screen door, closed the inside door, and gestured down the hall beyond the short foyer, extending into the heavy shadows beneath a stairs that presumably rose toward a second story.

“Straight ahead. That door there's the office.”

She hurried around both men, and again Spurr caught a glimpse of her comely features—clearly defined jaws above a patrician neck, skin tanned a little darker than ripe peaches, complimenting her honey hair and indicating she didn't hide from the sun.

Her eyes were brown and alight with a warm intelligence. Fine lines at their corners bespoke a woman in her thirties, maybe even late thirties—relatively easy years, at least physically, for she appeared straight and strong. The brown eyes also showed concern as she took a quick glimpse at Mason, then pushed through a varnished oak door beneath the stairs.

Spurr helped the sheriff into the office. It was a lavishly appointed room, though lit by only two tall, curtained windows, with a rolltop desk, leather divan, and several shelves and glass and metal cabinets. It smelled of camphor, carbolic acid, and leather. Maybe a tinge or two of aromatic pipe tobacco though a pipe hadn't been smoked here lately. The walls were papered light green with yellow corn patterns.

Two doors opened off the main office, and Spurr and Mason followed the woman into the room beyond the desk. There was a leather-upholstered examination table in the middle of the room, and Spurr helped Mason onto the table and then to lie back on it. Blood oozed out from the wound against which Mason was still pressing the bloody bandanna.

The woman glanced at the wound, shook her head, and clucked. “Why do you men do such things to each other?” She turned those large, soulful brown eyes on Spurr, and they sparked with urgency. “Out!” she commanded. “Fetch my neighbor, Alvina Winters. The little blue house to the east.”

Spurr stared at her, clumsily doffed his hat, and held it over his chest. “No offense, ma'am . . . but shouldn't we get the doctor in here?”

“I am the doctor, Mister . . .”

“Call me Spurr.”

She looked him over with vague appraising. “Spurr,” she said, her eyes flicking to his badge, which didn't seem to impress her.

Spurr looked her over in kind. “You're . . . the sawbones here in Diamondback?”

“That's right . . .” She hesitated, as though the single syllable word were too much for her delicate lips. “Spurr. Dickinson is my name. June Dickinson.”

She planted a fist on her hip and gave the dusty, sweaty, unshaven frontiersman a slightly challenging look. “I took over the doctoring duties in Diamondback after my husband was killed by Apaches. Now, will you fetch Mrs. Winters for me, please, Spurr? Before your friend here bleeds dry on my table?”

Spurr clamped his hat on his head and hurried out.

SPURR FETCHED THE crow-like little woman, Mrs. Winters, from her little blue house next door to June Dickinson's, split an armload of wood with which to stoke the Dickinson stove, and hauled water from the well. When he figured he was no longer needed, the women having retreated to the room in which Mason was parked and closed the door, Spurr went out and gathered up the reins of his and the sheriff's horses.

He led the mounts up to the main street, which a wooden sign proclaimed as First Street, and looked it up and down. Through the blowing dust, there didn't appear much here anymore. Many of the wooden or adobe-brick buildings had been boarded up. There was a church, a post office, a stone jailhouse, a blacksmith shop, and a few stores, including a furniture store and a drugstore, even a haberdashery. There was also a stage relay station—a large, low box of a place with a large corral and stable and a roof of red scoria. The establishments doing the best business, judging by the horses standing hang-headed at hitchracks, were the town's three or four saloons. Spurr passed all but one of the saloons as he headed east, toward the hotel, looking for a livery barn.

He found the Saguaro Livery and Feed Barn beside the Ace of Hearts Saloon, and went in to make arrangements with the middle-aged black hostler for his and Mason's horses to be curried, stabled in separate stalls, and fed. He looked around at the other horses munching oats from wooden buckets.

There were half a dozen or so. They all looked a little wild-eyed and sweaty. Recently ridden hard. The black man, who'd said his name was Earl Hedges, was rubbing down a tall skewbald paint as Spurr shouldered his rifle and looked around the barn's dusty shadows rife with the smell of oats, straw, and hot horses.

“These mounts come over from the hotel?” he asked the hostler.

“I believe that's where they come from, yes, suh,” Hedges said with a bored air as he rubbed down the paint, not looking at Spurr.

“You know who their riders are?”

“No, suh, I do not.” From his tone, Hedges didn't care to know. If he had known, he wouldn't have said. Spurr decided he didn't need to ask the man to not mention that he'd inquired.

Spurr went back out into the wind, slid the heavy door closed behind him, and turned to look east along the street in which dust danced and tumbleweeds bounded out from breaks between the northern buildings to pile up with hundreds of others against the forlorn-looking establishments on the street's south side.

Were the men he'd seen through the dust the de Cava gang? If so, Spurr might have run into a bit of good luck . . . if Captain Wilson's soldiers arrived to lend him a hand, that was. And if the gang didn't learn that the lawman dogging their trail was here in town before he wanted them to know . . .

Having to face them alone would be suicide.

Curiosity buzzing like blackflies around his ears, Spurr tramped eastward up the street, staying to the boardwalks beneath the awnings, swerving now and then to avoid the wooden shingles dancing wildly on their squawky chains. He passed a barbershop and a boarded-up saloon, a couple of rickety parlor houses, and stopped suddenly when a figure moved toward him on his right, descending the steps of the mercantile's broad loading dock.

The figure was slender and dark and holding a rifle under his right arm. Her right arm. Dark hair blew about her shoulders. She had her straw sombrero tipped low against the wind while cradling a small burlap bag in her left arm, against her side. She didn't see Spurr until she'd placed a boot on the street and begun to turn.

Spurr had stopped near the base of the steps. The girl stopped now with a start. The sombrero's broad brim tipped back, and two coffee-brown eyes stared out at him from a fine, Indian-dark face with pursed but pleasant lips and smooth, tapering cheekbones coated in tan dust.

She had a pistol on her hip—not a dainty thing, either. Her right gloved hand closed over the receiver of the Winchester, ready to bring it up.

Spurr locked curious gazes with the girl. His vest blew out away from the badge pinned to his shirt. Her eyes flicked to it before sliding back to his face, the skin above the bridge of her nose crinkling slightly and the eyes narrowing a bit.

Spurr kept his own rifle down as he said cautiously, “Afternoon.”

The girl stared at him.

Spurr glanced at the hotel on the street's left side, then looked at the girl once more, canting his head to one side. “From around here?”

The girl studied him for a time, then said, “No.” A pregnant pause, a slight arch of her right brow. “You?”

Spurr shook his head. He looked at the burlap pouch cradled against her side. She looked at it then, too, then again at the badge on Spurr's chest.

Her gaze lingered there for a time, and then she swung her attention to the hotel. A thin strand of dark hair fluttered against her cheek, beneath her right eye.