Last Lawman (9781101611456) (16 page)

“Riders, Captain!”

An adobe-brick wall partly surrounded the place, on the side facing Elkhorn Creek, from where trouble in the form of Indians had been most likely to come. Originally, the wall had been meant to surround the outpost, but the post had been abandoned before the wall had been finished.

The stockade was only about six feet high, but it offered a modicum of cover for soldiers shooting from behind it. There was a fifteen-foot-high guard tower on each end of the fort, and on the end near where the stockade’s wooden doors used to be, before someone had used them for firewood, stood one of the towers.

Private Homer Early was manning the tower while another guard patrolled the creek on foot and another held the scout on the fort’s northern end, which faced flat, open country rolling up toward the far eastern foothills of the Wind River mountains. Early was pointing beyond the creek now, his head turned toward Norbert, his slender body silhouetted against the sky, which had now turned purple and lime.

“How many?” Norbert called.

“Can’t tell fer sure. Looks like three horses. Comin’ at a trot.”

“Call Scarborough in,” Norbert ordered. Turning toward the bunkhouse, he yelled, “Pennyman!”

When the sergeant’s bulky body appeared in silhouette against the open doorway lit by yellow lamplight, Norbert said, “Riders headed this way. Just three, but bring your men.”

Pennyman saluted with the same hand in which he held a smoldering, half-smoked cigar. Norbert walked into his quarters that stood a ways off from the bunkhouse and barn with its connecting corral, near a springhouse. He stopped just inside the doorway and heard a sharp breath leap out of his throat.

He’d dropped his hand to the Colt .44 holstered on his right hip, but stayed his hand when he saw the yellow eyes of the coyote standing atop his small, square eating table staring back at him. The coyote’s back legs were on Norbert’s chair, its front legs on the table, on either side of the plate on which the captain had left a few scraps of food before he’d wandered out to the parade ground for air.

The coyote gave a low, guttural mewl, then leapt up onto the table and then out the open window on the table’s far side. Its fur glowed tawny gold in a vagrant ray of light before it dropped down beneath the window. It hit the ground outside with a soft grunt and ran toward a clump of brush. It stopped suddenly. Norbert watched it, frowning. The beast growled and sort of mewled, hackles raised, as it stared into the brush. Suddenly, it switched course and ran off around the stables, as though it had been afraid of something in the shrubs.

Norbert blew a relieved breath, chuckling to himself sheepishly at the start the beast had given him. He’d fought so many Indians in the past out here that he supposed he was still looking for a wild-assed Sioux or Arapaho behind every rock and sage shrub.

He grabbed his tan kepi off the table and his Sharps carbine from where he’d leaned it against the wall near his cot and the tack he’d piled on the earthen floor. He opened the
Sharps’s breech, making sure it showed brass, then quickly adjusted his kepi on his head and headed outside to see what the fuss was about.

Probably just drifting punchers, but in this country, you never knew…

As Norbert strode toward the stockade wall, Pennyman and six or seven enlisted men were streaming out of the bunkhouse, some tucking their shirts into their trousers, others making sure their carbines were loaded.

They were a good-looking lot as far as today’s frontier cavalry went—no cottontails amongst them. Norbert had handpicked the contingent himself. Most soldiers posted as remotely as Fort Stambaugh would desert first chance they got, but this crew took their jobs relatively seriously—mostly, Norbert guessed, because they’d been on the dodge from one thing or another in their civilian lives and had enlisted into the cavalry because they’d heard it was a good place to hide.

“You men stay inside the wall,” the captain told the soldiers, then turned to Pennyman, whom he was on a first-name basis with, often carousing with the sergeant during furloughs in Laramie or Rawlins.

“Jake, join me outside the wall,” Norbert said, smoothing down his salt-and-pepper, dragoon-style mustache with his
fingers. “Probably no one of any significance out there, but since the Vultures are supposed to be on the prod in these parts, no point in getting caught with our pants down.”

“Like to have me a shot at one o’ them,” said Pennyman, smoothing down his long, thick tangle of hair and then setting his leather-billed forage hat on his big-eared, rocklike skull.

The two men walked toward the opening in the wall.

“Just approaching the creek now, Cap,” said the private standing atop the guard tower, holding his Sharps carbine up high across his chest, ready.

“Thank you, Private,” said Norbert as he and Pennyman walked out through the gap in the wall.

Private Scarborough, short and squat but good with horses and not one to scare in a Sioux attack, stood just ahead, at the lip of the creek that was mostly brush-lined sandbars this late in the year. Norbert heard the thuds of the oncoming riders before he picked them out of the dark stretch of sage-stippled desert beyond the creek.

Two men leading a riderless horse. One of the men held what to be appeared a straw-haired woman in front of him, the woman’s head flopping against his chest. Norbert squinted, vaguely incredulous. The woman’s body was a pale smudge in the growing darkness.

Could she be nude?

As the three riders approached the creek, Norbert raised his pistol and triggered a round into the air, the maw sparking in the purple shadows.

“Hold on, there!” he shouted, making his presence known. “I’m Captain Davis Norbert. Who goes there?”

The riders reined their horses to skidding halts atop the shallow creek’s opposite bank. “Holy shit—you spooked the devil’s own hell out of us!” The voice of the rider riding single was loud in the dusky silence.

“You occupyin’ the outpost, Captain?” asked the rider who was carrying what did indeed appear to be a naked woman.

“What’s it look like? You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m Lawton. This is Burns. Line riders for the Tilted W. We got an injured girl here. Found her along the trail a ways back. She’s messed up good. You got a medico with you, Captain?”

“Of sorts,” Norbert said, nodding, his blood quickening when he saw the girl’s obvious dire condition. “Bring her on over!”

Norbert holstered his Colt as the rider with the woman booted his buckskin down the draw’s opposite bank. He galloped across, then up the side near Norbert, Sergeant Pennyman, and Private Scarborough. The second rider followed, both horses blowing and kicking up dirt and gravel.

The lone rider was tall and thin but vaguely Comanche-featured and not an attractive hombre by anyone’s standards. He was dressed nearly entirely in black but with a red vest under his black wool coat. But there were few good-looking men this far out on the devil’s backside, and you didn’t need to be a dude to be good at punching cows. The man holding the girl was sandy-whiskered and built like a bull, with close-set eyes and no neck to speak of and a broad-brimmed tan hat with a torn brim.

He looked down at Norbert and Pennyman moving up to him, and his eyes flashed anxiously beneath his hat brim. “Found her out yonder near her torn dress and this hoss standing over her.”

“Jayzus H.,” muttered Pennyman in his faint Scottish brogue. “Looks like she’s been shot.”

Norbert’s eyes had taken their natural man’s look at the blonde’s voluptuous body before straying to the bloody hole in her right side. The blood flashed wetly in the fading light. It trickled down her side, across her hip, and down her naked right thigh. She lay back against the bull’s broad chest, eyes squeezed shut, groaning and sort of whimpering as she shook her head from side to side. Her heavy, sloping breasts rose and fell sharply as she breathed. Her eyes opened
slightly, and she pinned Norbert with a look of fierce agony and—something else—fear? Vaguely, the captain thought the look was almost like one of warning, but then the girl squeezed her eyes closed once more as pain visibly rippled through her, and the captain let the thought go.

Norbert looked at the bull, Lawton. “You don’t know her?”

“Not from Adam’s off ox. Just know she’s gonna die we keep jabberin’.”

Norbert turned toward the opening in the stockade wall in which a half-dozen soldiers stood, all holding rifles and staring toward the captain and the naked blonde. “Donner over there?”

“Here, Captain,” said the medico, Donner, as the stringbean corporal stepped out away from the group, handing his rifle to one of the others.

Donner walked over to Lawton’s horse. He paused a moment, flushing a little behind his round-rimmed spectacles, as he looked at the girl’s lush body.

“Go ahead, Donner—take a look at her,” Norbert said. “You think there’s somethin’ you can do?”

“We’ll need to get her into the bunkhouse so’s I can examine her,” said Donner, his voice quaking nervously.

He wasn’t really a medico, just a farm kid who’d helped out his hometown doctor a few times and was fairly adept at setting broken bones and tending the usual bruises, lice-infestations, snakebites, heat stroke, and minor wounds that were part and parcel to military life on the frontier. His skills were mostly only used on details like this, away from the main pill roller at Fort Stambaugh.

Norbert looked up at Lawton. “Ride her on up to the bunkhouse. Make way, men!”

“Yes, sir,” said the bull-like man, whipping his rein ends across the flanks of his mount.

He and the other rider lunged through the gate as the small cavvy of soldiers made way for them, staring in awe
at the naked woman in Lawton’s arms. As though they’d never seen a nude girl before. Maybe some of them hadn’t, silently mused the captain as he and Pennyman jogged after the horses. Donner overtook them both, nudging his glasses up his nose as he ran like a kid late for school, pumping his arms and legs, eager to recuse the naked damsel in dire distress.

When the riders hauled up in front of the bunkhouse, whose open windows were lit from within, Donner was hot on their horses’ heels. Breathless, he reached up to take the blonde out of Lawton’s hands. Then the kid carried her through the low door and into the bunkhouse, both Lawton and Burns dropping their reins and anxiously following.

Norbert and Pennyman, both breathless, walked in behind them. Norbert removed his hat out of habit in the presence of ladies—even unconscious ones—and watched as Pennyman hurried over to help the other two men clear the long eating table of tin plates and forks and other paraphernalia left from the men’s supper, swiping it all onto the floor with a raucous clatter.

Then Burns helped the young medico lay the girl onto the table, where Donner nudged his glasses up his nose once more, then nervously wiped his hands on his pale blue trousers before crouching over the wound in the moaning girl’s side.

Once again, Norbert, standing back by the door, his hat in his hands, noted how comely she was. Big-breasted, with rounded hips and a waist not overly thin nor round. A nice, soft belly—one a man, especially a lonely soldier, could really bury his face in while he kneaded her big…

The captain shook his head with chagrin as he realized the direction his thoughts had taken. Christ, what was wrong with him? Too long this far out in Wyoming, he reckoned. Few whores in Laramie or Rawlins looked anything like the golden-haired, round-faced young creature moaning and groaning on the table before him.

Who in hell was she, anyway? Norbert had never seen her before though he figured he’d seen most everyone who lived in these parts—and that wasn’t very many folks at all. There were way more cattle than people. Maybe she was some rancher’s daughter run down by brigands, roughed up and shot and left to die so she couldn’t identify her abusers.

Donner lifted his head from the girl’s bloody side. The young man’s eyes were dark behind his spectacle lenses winking in the dull light from the three flickering lanterns. “Doesn’t look good, Cap. Appears she was shot at close range. I think the ball went all the way through, but she’s most likely scrambled up pretty ba…”

The medico let his voice trail off. His eyes went to the door flanking Norbert. Norbert turned to see all the rest of the soldiers crowding close to the open doorway, nudging against each other like penned cattle, trying their best to see over and around each other at the naked girl on the table.

Norbert raised his hands to shoo the men away, but his eyes caught on something behind them.

Not something.

Some
one
.

Men moving around, their shadows long and thick in the twilight as they walked spread out in a line from the direction of the barn and corral. By ones and twos, the young soldiers turned around to follow the captain’s puzzled gaze with their own, until they saw the men walking toward them.

“What is it, Cap?” Pennyman said behind Norbert.

The captain felt a thousand reptiles of dread crawling up his legs and back. He glanced at the sergeant beside him and saw Lawton and Burns standing around Donner and the naked girl on the table. They were looking at Norbert.