Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) (4 page)

“That there, Ma, is gold dust,” Lewis said, throwing back another belt from his coffee mug. “Maybe ten pounds' worth.”

The old woman stopped rocking. Trudy turned slowly from her bucket, holding her soapy hands straight down in front of her soiled apron and shabby gingham dress. The top of her dress drew taut against her swelling breasts. Her brown eyes were riveted on the gold.

“Go ahead and read the letter, since you can read so well, red man,” Lewis said. The man's hard tone tied a half-hitch knot in the half-breed's gut.

The way the women were eyeing the gold made the knot even tauter.

Chapter 4

A gun blasted in the street outside the Snowy Range Hotel. A man screamed. Glendolene Mendenhour, dozing in her deep copper tub, awoke with a gasp. She pushed herself up out of the water, grabbed a towel, walked barefoot to the room's single window, and slid the rose red curtain aside with the back of her hand.

She squinted into the street below. The lit candles and oil lamp she'd lined up on the dresser were reflected in the dark glass, but then she saw beyond the reflections a man stumble out of the Longhorn Saloon on the street's far side, nearer the hotel than the Silk Slipper. This smaller, rougher saloon than the Slipper sat perpendicular to the hotel, its side facing the Snowy Range, so Glendolene could see only the man's profile as he staggered across the saloon's porch, clutching both hands to his belly.

There was a flash inside the saloon. A quarter second later, the gun's blast rattled the hotel window in front of Glendolene, and she gave another gasp as she took one step back but continued staring down at the street lit by oil pots and torches bracketed to porch posts. The wounded man jerked and then flopped forward down the porch steps to lie sprawled in the street. The five or six horses tied to the saloon's hitch rack whinnied and nickered and pulled against their reins.

Glendolene clutched the blanket tight around her dripping, wet body. “Good
Lord
!”

Two men in fur coats, one holding what appeared to be a gun in his right hand, walked out of the saloon to stare down at the man in the street, whom Glendolene could hear groaning and rolling from side to side in agony.

One of the two men on the porch holstered his pistol, said something to the man standing beside him. They laughed, then turned and walked back into the saloon. Behind them, the wounded man continued to thrash around, groaning. Glendolene stared, aghast, as the saloon's double front doors closed.

What were they going to do—just leave him there to die alone in the street?

It was a cold night, and no one else was out and about. Smoke wafted in ghostly gray tufts over the street. A single rider materialized from the east, to Glendolene's left, and the man dressed in a long hide coat and with a red scarf tied over his head beneath his hat merely glanced once at the wounded man and then crouched to casually light a cigarette before touching spurs to his horse's flanks. Horse and rider trotted on past the wounded man, disappearing to Glendolene's right.

Her heart thudded as she stood there before the window, clad in only a towel, her thick hair piled atop her head, and stared down at the thrashing figure of the man who was surely dying. Dying alone on a cold night in a Wolfville street, while a saloon full of men and parlor girls frolicked only a few yards behind him.

Wind gusted, blowing silhouettes of trash along the street. Something moved beyond the dying man, and Glendolene stretched her gaze toward the gallows beyond the saloon. Something long and dark swayed beneath the platform. More revulsion washed through Glendolene as she stared at the body of Preston Betajack still hanging there.

“What on earth . . . ?” she muttered.

But she knew why Betajack still hung from the gallows. He remained there as Lee's and Sheriff Neumiller's grisly example to any outlaws passing through town, and as a stern message to Betajack's outlaw father to clear out of the county. His brand of ranching, which mostly involved rustling cattle and horses from other men's ranches, and which had been a bane to Lee's own spread that he shared with his own father, Wild Bill Mendenhour, would no longer be tolerated in Big Horn County. It was also Lee's and Neumiller's message to Betajack that, despite the hired guns on his roll, they weren't afraid of him.

Sending such a message was all well and good, she supposed. It was the frontier's brand of justice. But word of the hanging likely would have spread by now. Why leave the body to the crows?

Glendolene returned her gaze to the wounded man thrashing now with less vigor in front of the Longhorn Saloon. “Help me,” she heard him say, weakly, ramming the back of one fist into the ground beside him.

She backed away from the window. She turned away quickly, as though to rid the man from her mind as well as her eyes. She couldn't help him. She had no real desire to help. He'd probably deserved that bullet he'd been fed in the Longhorn, and it was none of her business, anyway. As Lee had told her over and over again, it was a harsh world out here. It begat harsh men who died badly at times. Such was the price of living at all.

“Help me. . . .”

Glendolene tensed her shoulders, trying to fight the image of the dying man, his weakening pleas, from her mind. She tried to think about the stage ride tomorrow, of spending Christmas with the couple who'd raised her—Uncle Walt and Aunt Evelyn Birdsong. They owned a harness shop and blacksmith business in Belle Fourche, and they'd raised her since she was seven years old, when her own parents had died in a plague. She even tried to think about Lee and their life together, and if she really wanted that life to continue on the ranch where she was treated like a child by Lee and his overbearing father, Wild Bill.

She couldn't even ride out alone on a horse, as she'd so enjoyed doing in Dakota, despite her being as capable in the saddle as nearly any of the men at Chain Link. If she did, she incurred a loud, castigating rebuke from Wild Bill himself, if one of the hands had seen her, and by Lee if he was around and not off riding around the county with Neumiller, laying down his hard, uncompromising brand of justice.

They thought that she might encounter a rattlesnake and her horse would throw her, or that she wouldn't be able to find her way back to the ranch. She knew how to avoid such dangers. They treated her like property, or worse—like a child incapable of fending for herself, though she had been raised to be no hothouse flower, and she was tired of it.

“Goddamn . . . sons o' bitches . . . !” came another deep-throated plea from outside. “Help . . . me . . .
bastards
!”

She turned back to the window. The wounded man was trying to sit up, fumbling to get a purchase on the Longhorn's porch steps. Still, no one appeared to be going to the man's aid.

What was Glendolene supposed to do—climb back into her bath and pretend she hadn't seen him and couldn't hear him while he bled his life out in the street?

Unable to stand by any longer while a man died before her—where was Neumiller, anyway?—Glendolene toweled herself dry, dressed quickly in a chemise and pantaloons, then threw on a heavy wool robe. She stepped into a pair of elk-skin slippers and left the room. She locked the door, pocketed the key, and padded downstairs.

There was no one at the hotel desk in the lobby. She glanced into the dining room, hoping she'd find the Indian who'd escorted her to her room earlier, but apparently the dining room had closed since she and Lee had dined together an hour ago, before Lee had left to play poker with several businessmen friends of his and his father's. The dining room chairs were stacked upside down on the tables from which the white cloths had been removed. Luther was probably out in his shack behind the hotel.

Spying no one else, Glendolene pushed through the double glass doors and looked around, shivering as a chill wind bit into her. She fought the doors closed against a strong gust and latched them. Reaching up, she removed the pins from her hair and let it fall in a messy tangle about her neck, somewhat keeping the wind from sliding its icy hands down her back, chilling her to the bone.

She looked across the street. The wounded man sat slumped on the bottom step of the Longhorn Saloon, elbows on his knees, head dipped toward his chest. In the windows of the saloon behind him, shadows slid this way and that.

She glanced at the dark, swinging figure of Preston Betajack, felt a shudder independent of the wind rattle through her, and then moved on down the porch steps. Halfway across the street, a newspaper blew against her legs, and she paused to kick it free, losing one of her slippers as she did.

She cursed, set the foot clad in a thin silk stocking down in the cold street, and hobbled forward until she'd regained the slipper. Continuing across, she stopped before the man slumped forward, legs extended before him, boot toes pointed out, spurs ringing as the wind raked them. He'd lost his hat, and thin strands of gray-brown hair blew back across his bony, nearly bald skull.

“Are you . . . alive . . . ?” she asked, feeling inadequate for the task, shivering, holding the robe closed across her breasts. The horses to her left all looked at her curiously, their tails blowing up over their backs.

The man lifted his head slightly. He was silhouetted against the saloon lights behind him, so she couldn't see his face clearly, but his eyes appeared slitted. He had a thin gray beard and a mole off the right corner of his thin-lipped mouth. The fur of his bear vest rippled in the wind.

“I'm hurt bad, lady,” he said tightly, just loudly enough for Glendolene to hear. “Get me to a doc, will ya?” He smelled strongly of alcohol.

“Hold on.”

Glendolene climbed the porch steps and pulled open one of the saloon doors. She stepped inside, drawing the door closed behind her, and looked around at the long, smoky, lantern-lit room.

There were a dozen or so scruffy-looking men milling about the place, some obscured by the thick tobacco smoke. Half were standing at the bar to her right. Glendolene nearly choked on the stench of the smoke, sweat, leather, strong drink, and women's sweet perfume. One of the three women in the room laughed raucously off to her right, pointing at a man crawling around on the floor on his hands and knees and swinging his head and whinnying like a horse.

“Jump on ole Charlie horse's back, Lil, an' I'll ride ya upstairs fer a tumble!” howled the drunkard.

Glendolene looked at several of the men staring back at her. Their eyes, opaque from drink, raked her up and down, lips stretching with vague lasciviousness.

“Hey,” said the nearest man standing at the bar, blinking slowly beneath his broad hat brim.

Glendolene turned and went back out. She moved carefully down the steps and turned to the man slumped before her. “Do you know where the doctor's office is?”

The man lifted his head, looked at her, and pointed halfheartedly in the direction of the gallows. She looked that way to see several wooden buildings standing to the left of the Silk Slipper, before the brightly lit windows of which a dozen or so horses stood tied.

“All right,” Glendolene said, crouching beside the man. “If I'm going to help you, you're going to have to help me. Can you stand?”

He nodded slowly.

Glendolene slid up against him and wrapped his left arm around her shoulders. “Help me now!”

He planted his boots in the dust of the street and used his legs to help Glendolene hoist him to a standing position. As he leaned into her, she stepped forward, grunting under the man's weight as she walked him across the street, keeping the gallows on her left, the Silk Slipper on her right. She felt the slick wetness of the blood oozing out of him, and she gave another inward shudder, hearing the painfully thin breaths wheezing in his lungs.

They were halfway to the other side of the street when a gurgle traveled up from deep in his throat and suddenly his knees buckled. He fell, dragging her down on top of him with a surprised scream.

“Glendolene?” said a familiar voice.

Sprawled over the top of the wounded man's body, she looked up to see two figures standing on the Silk Slipper's front stoop, above the fidgeting horses, staring toward her.

“Oh, God—help me, Lee!”

Both men ran down the porch steps and around the horses as Glendolene looked down at the wounded man, who lay now with his eyes open, his chest rising and falling shallowly. His mouth was open, and he was making a faint sucking sound.

“What in the name of Christ is going on, Glendolene?” Lee said as he dropped to a knee on the other side of the man she'd been trying to help. “What are you
doing
out here? Who
is
this man?”

“I don't know. I saw him—”

“Karl Luedtke,” said Sheriff Neumiller, standing over the man who now looked dead. “Wolfer. Comes in from time to time to cheat at cards over at the Longhorn.”

“That's where he was shot,” said Glendolene, sitting back on her heels. “No one was helping him. I saw him from the hotel window and came out to try to get him over to the doctor's.”

“For cryin' out loud, Dave,” her husband intoned, staring at Neumiller, “don't you have any deputies making the rounds this evening?”

“Sure I do. Warren's out delivering a subpoena, but Jim Harrison should be out here somewhere . . .” Neumiller let his voice, thick from drink, trail off as he looked around the nearly empty street. “Maybe he's warmin' up for a spell back at the office. Cold out here.” He looked down at the wounded man and shook his head as he puffed on a fat, half-smoked stogie. “Luedtke's looked better—I'll give him that.”

Glendolene slid her exasperated gaze from her husband to Neumiller and back again. Both men reeked of tobacco smoke, alcohol, and—this was no surprise and it troubled her only slightly—women's perfume. “He has little chance of looking any better until we get him to the doctor, gentlemen!”

“Of course!” Lee leaped to his feet, glancing down at the bloody man distastefully, then turning to Neumiller. “Can you . . . ?”

The Silk Slipper's front doors opened, and Lee called to the men walking, slightly staggering, onto the stoop. When the men were moving between the horses and heading toward the wounded Mr. Luedtke, Glendolene climbed to her feet and brushed the dirt, gravel, and flecks of horse manure from her robe. As she did, she glanced toward the gallows to her left.

Something there flashed in the light from several oil pots and the lamplight emanating from the Silk Slipper. She stared at the darkness beneath the gallows. As Lee and Sheriff Neumiller guided the other men, who bore Mr. Luedtke between them, toward an outside stairs that climbed to the doctor's office, Glendolene wandered slowly, cautiously over to the gallows, feeling a deep revulsion growing in her belly.