Last Lawman (9781101611456) (29 page)

As she leaned sideways in the saddle, threatening to tumble to the ground, he said, “Grab the horn!”

She shook her head weakly and opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off with an enraged,
“Grab it!”

She did, sobbing. He grabbed his rifle, then untied the reins and stepped into the saddle behind her. As she lolled back against him, he ground his heels into the horse’s flanks and lit off in the direction he’d come. He’d no sooner passed the cabin and saw the furry black gap of the ravine stretching beyond it than guns began thundering and flashing.

“There he is!”

Spurr raised his arms on either side of Erin, shielding her somewhat, and shouted, “Ha-yahh, horse! H-hahhhhh!”

Bullets screeched around him, zinging off the ground on the other side of him, ahead and behind. The horse faltered,
and a cold stone dropped deep in Spurr’s belly as he thought the beast had been hit. But the horse regained its stride and barreled off into the darkness angling gradually toward the ravine that was a broad, black line on Spurr’s left.

The flashing of the guns drifted off to his left flank, and then, mercifully, the bullets were falling short, thudding into the ground twenty, thirty, forty yards back in the direction of the cabin. Spurr swung the horse directly toward the ravine and trotted along its bank before finding a game path down into its murky, inky depths.

When, fifteen minutes later, he climbed up over the opposite bank, the horse blowing and snorting, the woman still lolling back against him, he stopped the mount. He looked back at the dark ravine. A menacing silence issued from its other side, from back in the direction of the Vultures’ cabin.

Would they pursue him tonight in the darkness or wait for morning?

Spurr had to assume they’d come tonight. He rode on out across the flat a ways, then stuck two fingers between his lips and whistled. He did not wait but turned the horse and booted it into a canter to the west, in the direction of South Pass City. When he and the woman had ridden a quarter mile, Spurr heard thuds behind him and turned to see the big roan galloping toward him, snorting and blowing and rattling the bit in his teeth.

Spurr stopped the outlaws’ mount and swung down from the saddle, turning to Cochise, who stood obediently before him. “Figured you’d blown the coop after you heard that lead swap.” He really hadn’t. The horse was well trained. The old lawman was just chattering to ease his nerves. He lifted Erin off the outlaws’ mount and set her in his own saddle on Cochise’s back, the horse craning its head to look her over, as if he’d never seen her before.

“It’s her,” Spurr told the horse, glancing up at her. “She just ain’t feelin’ too well, hoss.”

She sat straight-backed in the saddle, her hair sliding
down to nearly cover her face. She stared straight ahead, her face a waxy heart shape in the darkness, her eyes so dark that the sockets seemed empty. She didn’t seem to be breathing, and Spurr knew with a chill that she didn’t want to be.

Her son was dead. She wanted to join the boy. He couldn’t blame her, but he wasn’t going to let it happen. Life was a cold-eyed bitch at times, but it had to be lived.

He swung up onto Cochise’s back and, leading the spare horse, continued heading west.

Clell Stanhope kept his right hand wrapped around the neck of his sawed-off barn blaster as he mounted the porch’s stone steps. He stopped in the doorway, Lester and Magpie Quint flanking him. Inside, Quiet Boon Coffey and Ed Crow were crouched over the still form of Santos Estrada, whom Clell had sent back to the cabin in case the old lawman had headed here.

Which he had.

Estrada lay flat on his back, blood like red pudding staining his serape. Clell strode inside the cabin and Lester and Magpie walked up to either side, all looking around the smoky, messy front room, their gear piled and scattered everywhere amongst empty bottles and airtight tins.

Quiet Boon Coffey, who never said much but let his two silver-chased Bisleys and his Sharps carbine do his speaking for him, looked incredulously up at Clell. “Spurr?”

Clell walked around Coffey and Crow and the dead Estrada and strode down the short hall to the second of the two curtained doorways on the right. The curtain hung tangled. Behind it, the small room was dark and empty, only an airtight tin—the peach tin that Clell himself had left there—shone in the starlight pushing through the unshuttered window.

Clell squeezed the neck of his sawed-off gut-shredder
harder in his sweaty, gloved hands. His pulse throbbed in his fingers, anger rocketing through him. Not just anger—embarrassment. He’d underestimated old Spurr Morgan. He hadn’t figured on the man tracking him and the others in the dark, following the woman, then making them all look like bung-headed hillbillies by leading them up the draw yonder and circling around to snatch the woman out of their lair.

Clell had wanted to use the woman to lure Spurr into his trap, all right…so Clell could kill the old man slowly just for fun and to show Spurr how old and dried up and useless he was.

Just for fun. So that he and the others could laugh while the old man howled as he died slow.

But the old man—nothing but brittle bones and sinew garbed in ragged buckskins and a grubby hickory shirt—had made Clell look like a damn fool. Him, Clell Stanhope. Leader of the Vultures—the most savage and feared gang to ever prowl this neck of the postwar frontier.

Spurr was likely having himself a good laugh over this right now, wherever he was.

Clell was tensing his jaws so tightly that they ached as he strode back down the short hall and into the main room, where all his remaining men stood in a semicircle, facing him, on the other side of the sprawled carcass of Santos Estrada. The monkey stove ticked; the coffeepot burped.

The men looked grim beneath their hat brims.

Lester sneered. “No way that old badge toter done this, Clell. He must have someone ridin’ with him.”

“Shut up, Lester,” Clell said, walking over to the eating table and splashing whiskey into a tin cup.

Lester scowled indignantly.

Magpie Quint loudly rolled the cylinder of his Buntline Special across his forearm, making a solid, spinning sound in the tense silence. “What’re we doin’ here, Boss?” he said tightly. “Let’s git after him.”

Clell’s hand shook as he slowly lifted his cup to his lips once more and drank. “Let’s not be bigger fools than we already are—okay, Magpie? Is that all right with you?”

The others sort of flinched at Clell’s hard glare.

He sagged into a chair and said with toneless menace. “He’s headin’ for South Pass City. Only place he could be headed with the woman.” He sipped from his cup, swallowed, and said even more quietly, flatly as he set the cup back down on the table. “We’ll run into him there. Settle this thing.”

He set his sawed-off shotgun on the table and stared at it.

Spurr sipped from his steaming coffee cup as he stared across the fire at Erin. She lay curled on her side, facing him and the fire, a blanket pulled up across her shoulders. Her hair lay in a brown tangle across her face. Her eyes were closed.

Spurr raised his quirley to his lips and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. Blowing it out, he turned to look toward the east. The sun was rising, blossoming rose over the shadowy gray hills, a few flat-topped buttes silhouetted against it. A cool breeze blew, foretelling the end of summer at this high altitude.

Spurr figured they were about seven thousand feet above sea level. If he remembered right, South Pass City was around eight thousand. He hadn’t visited the town, once a small city, in a while. The last time, there hadn’t been much left of it since the Oregon Trail, running ten miles south from east to west, had been rendered obsolete by the transcontinental railroad and the stage lines, and by the gold along the banks of Willow Creek having been mined out.

He hoped for Erin’s sake it had a hotel with a soft bed and a good sawbones.

He turned back to her now, humped on the other side of the fire. Her eyes were open, staring at the flames that were
growing thin now with the gradually intensifying morning light. She didn’t blink for a long time, and when she finally did, she spoke, as well.

“It was when I looked into those cold, leering eyes of Clell Stanhope that I remembered he’d shot him down like some chicken-thieving dog in the street.”

Her voice had been toneless, dry, utterly lacking in emotion. As though all her sorrow lay lodged so deep in her soul that there was none near enough the surface to be expressed except for a flat hopelessness in her eyes. Spurr knew there was nothing he could say to ease her misery, so he merely took another sip of his coffee and looked out over the rolling sage-spotted hills, toward the Vultures’ cabin that lay about ten miles northeast.

“Best have you a cup of coffee,” he said after a time, nodding at the black pot he’d set on one of the stones ringing the fire. It leaned toward the flames, steam curling from its spout. “Then we’d better fog some sage.”

She did not move beneath the blanket, but her eyes lifted slightly to regard him dully over the opaque, dancing flames. “Spurr, do you have anyone?”

He pursed his lips, shook his head.

“Neither do I.”

“Yeah, but you’re young enough to start over.”

The thought seemed to disgust her. She dropped her lids slowly, heavily down over her eyes. “I don’t want to start over.”

“You’ll change your mind.” Spurr grabbed a leather swatch and used it to lift the coffeepot from the rock and fill an empty cup. He extended it toward her. She didn’t even look at it, merely shook her head slightly as she continued to stare at the flames as though trying to decipher some hidden message written amongst them.

He tossed the coffee out and stood. “I know you don’t feel up to it, but we’d best get movin’, Erin.”

“Where are we going, Spurr?”

“South Pass City.”

“What’s there?”

“A hotel, I hope. Food. I could use a drop of whiskey.”

“The Vultures will follow us,” she said in that same, chilling monotone.

Spurr emptied his coffeepot on the fire, dousing the flames. Steam hissed and wafted. “Yep, they sure will.”

He walked away to fetch the horses.

South Pass City sat quietly in a bowl amongst the sage-covered hills sheathing Willow Creek, along which gold had been found and carted off several years ago, leaving the shadow of a town in its bustling wake.

Really, the town wasn’t even a shadow of its former self anymore. It was a sad ruin that the high desert appeared to be taking back by hook and crook—the sage returning over ancient wheel ruts, tumbleweeds blowing between mostly abandoned shanties and stock pens and business buildings, some blowing straight through via the town’s old main drag without anything to interrupt them. Not horses or wagons or the hundreds of rushing prospectors, cardsharps, whores, cold-steel artists, and confidence men who’d once called the town home—at least for a season or two.

Spurr had killed the legendary gunman Lyle Tate here about seven years ago, at the height of the boom. That was when Zachariah Dawson had been the town marshal, boasting four deputies, all gone now. No, not gone, Spurr thought as, riding into the eerily silent town, he glanced over to the
town’s cemetery on a flat-topped knoll overlooking the creek. The boneyard was a collection of stone and board markers and wooden crosses presided over by a single ragged juniper and a sprawling cottonwood.

Dawson and his deputies had all been killed during an outlaw raid on the town and planted there. A few lawmen had worn the South Pass City badge since then, but, as far as Spurr had heard, they’d merely drifted on because as the gold disappeared and the town died, there was no longer any need for them. Certainly no need now. While most of the buildings were still here, most were boarded up, abandoned, or falling down.

A few horses were tied here and there to hitchracks before the few surviving businesses, but mostly only the tumbleweeds moved, nudged by breezes. The town was now mostly a supply camp for area farms and ranches and the mining camps pocking the Wind Rivers in the northwest. A loose shutter slapped against the old Wind River Hotel and Saloon; it danced in a sudden wind blowing down off the high mountains, tapping and scraping, tapping and scraping in feeble tribute to the cacophony of song and dance and ribald laughter that had once emanated from one of the most lucrative hotels west of Laramie.

Spurr drew up in front of the Overland Trail House. The three-story, wood-frame hotel had never been as prime a destination as the Wind River, but it had done a fine business in its own right, patronized by miners and saddle tramps who partook of its slightly lower grade of whiskey and whores, but which now looked brown and shrunken and just another dusty, sun-weathered ruin despite the
OPEN
sign hanging in its dusty front window.

Spurr swung down from the leather and looked at Erin, who had taken over her own reins and had obediently followed the old lawman across the rolling foothills—complying with his wishes to stay seated on the outlaw horse, and to follow him, but doing nothing more than that.
Saying nothing. Merely riding. A husk of a woman owning a heartbeat, breath passing in and out of her lungs. But nothing more than that. If she’d had her gun, Spurr was sure that she would have used it on herself long before now.