Last Lawman (9781101611456) (6 page)

At least, that was Spurr’s guess about the youngster’s business. He didn’t know for certain-sure, because while he and the lad had ridden the Burlington Flyer up from Denver, and then the spur line west from Chugwater, the kid had rebuffed any and all of Spurr’s attempts at friendly, boredom-relieving conversation. He’d merely gazed out the stock car’s open door and yawned and grunted or chewed his fingernails or sat dangling his legs toward the tracks and staring at his big right toe sticking out of the hole in his boot as though it were some complicated problem he was forever trying to solve.

That was a cowpuncher, for you. Too stupid to talk. Probably an east Texan. Spurr had known horses smarter than most of the cowpunchers he’d known, and he’d known many, having been one himself back in his younger days down in the Texas
brasada
country and on the Oklahoma panhandle.

Spurr stared after the cowboy loping off into the western distance along the rails. Coal smoke and briefly glowing cinders puffed from the engine’s diamond-shaped stack, obscuring Spurr’s view for a moment before billowing toward Wyoming’s high-arching, faultless blue sky.

Since the train carried so few passengers on this leg, the depot master had time to gas with the two trainsmen, rising up and down on the toes of his black brogans, jingling the change in his pockets and chuckling and shaking his head—likely a poor, lonely soul this far out in the tall and uncut.

The town beyond the depot appeared to have a total of eight buildings—three business establishments and five cottonwood log cabins that had turned the silver of a newly minted nickel in the unforgiving Wyoming summer sun.
Spurr hoped at least one of those establishments had a drink in it. Intending to find out, he pushed Cochise’s bit into the horse’s mouth, tightened the latigo strap beneath his belly, then toed a stirrup, grabbed the apple, and pushed and pulled his old, withered carcass into the leather.

He’d just gotten seated when his breath grew short and the dun prairie and blue sky began to pitch and swirl around him.

“Shit!” he rasped through gritted teeth, his heart hiccupping in his ears. “Goddamn, you old…!”

Spurr quickly wrapped his reins around his saddlehorn. That steel crab had closed a pincher over his pumper again. His left arm grew heavy, so he used his right hand to dig into an inside pocket of his elkskin vest for a small leather sack.

One-handed, he pulled the sack open, plucked out a small, gold tablet that his sawbones called a “heart starter” but that Spurr knew was nitroglycerin, and popped it into his mouth. He threw his head back and swallowed hard before leaning forward against the saddle horn to wait for the nitro pill to give his old ticker the kick in the pants it needed and to shrug off the crab’s assault.

“You all right over there, mister?”

Spurr looked to his left. The depot agent had turned away from the men busy filling the locomotive’s boiler to give his concerned gaze to the old lawman sitting crouched atop the big roan. The agent wavered drunkenly from side to side, only Spurr knew that it wasn’t the man himself staggering but Spurr’s oxygen-starved image of him. The blue-uniformed man shifted around a few more times before he gradually steadied, standing where he was off the far front corner of the shack, his hands in his pockets.

Then the lawman’s old heart stopped buck kicking like a broomtail bronc in his chest. It settled down and started beating more slowly, regularly, and without the ache stretching across his chest and into his left shoulder and arm.

One time, likely soon, he knew, it would kick him right on out of here and off to storied Glory, wherever in hell that
was. But for now, once more, the pill had done its job. Spurr straightened in his saddle, extended his left arm before him, flexed his fingers, and drew a long, refreshing breath. His throat opened to welcome the life-sustaining substance into his chest.

Air never tasted as wonderful as on the heels of one of his “colicky pumper spells.”

“Sir?” the agent said, frowning beneath the leather bill of his uniform cap.

Spurr looked at him. He appeared around thirty, half Spurr’s age. He had a big, open, clear-eyed face. The face of a midwestern farmboy, most likely. A juniper. A hayseed. There was no touch of gray in his blond sideburns or blond mustache. He had a paunch, but his shoulders were straight and strong.

Spurr didn’t recognize him. Once, he’d known all the railroaders in this neck of the West. Now, most of the men with whom he’d drifted to the wild and wooly frontier in the years preceding the war, and then again
after
the war, were either dead or holed up in a rooming house somewhere, playing checkers, filing their dentures, or sneaking off to the nearest saloon for a proscribed shot of red-eye to dull the pain of their syphilis.

Spurr chuckled at the thought. He raised his gloved hand to the depot agent. “Son,” Spurr said, “it was just the devil reachin’ up to tickle my toes there for a minute. He’ll do that just to remind me what’s comin’.”

“You’re lookin’ a little pale, mister.”

“Will I find a drink over yonder?”

The depot agent canted his head toward the small collection of buildings to the north. “The Bighorn Saloon will set you up right nicely.”

“That’ll bring the color back to these old cheeks. Much obliged.” Spurr slanted a stiff finger against his tan hat brim and touched his heels to Cochise’s flanks.

As the horse sauntered off toward the single-track trail
leading away from the rails and the depot toward the buildings beyond, the agent called behind him, “Hey, wait a minute, mister.”

Spurr drew back on Cochise’s reins, curveted the horse, and looked back at the depot agent.

The man frowned more curiously than before and gave a wry, disbelieving chuckle. “Ain’t you Spurr Morgan? The lawman?”

Spurr touched his fingers to the thin gray-brown beard hanging off his wart-studded chin and looked off. “Am I?” He returned his blue-eyed gaze to the agent regarding him with a half-skeptical grin. “You know—I might just be. When you get to be my age, you’re lucky if you remember to wear your underwear.”

He reined Cochise up the trail and threw up a parting hand. “Word to the wise, young man—don’t ever get old!”

Cochise clomped slowly along the trail toward the collection of mismatched buildings comprising the jerkwater stop of Alkali Flats. Some of the log buildings were obviously older, probably built well before the spur line had been laid. A couple, including a large, white, Victorian-style hotel, looked far newer.

Spurr was in no hurry. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and he wasn’t due to meet Sheriff Dusty Mason here for another hour. He’d returned to Denver from New Mexico three days ago, having polished off Hector Philpot’s bunch and buried poor Kenny Potter near the cabin where he’d been shot. He’d no sooner written his report, sort of fudging the details of how Philpot himself had died just a tad, and turned it in to Chief Marshal Henry Brackett’s office than the old chief marshal had laid this new assignment on his most veteran deputy.

Funny, Spurr thought, how the chief marshal always prefaced each assignment with the obligatory recommendation
that Spurr retire down in Mexico. Brackett never pushed the matter, however. It seemed to please him just to mention it and have Spurr snort and chuckle and brush his fist across his warty nose.

Spurr might have been the oldest lawdog in Brackett’s stable, but Brackett, no spring chicken himself, knew the value of a keeping a lawman of Spurr’s experience in his cavvy of commissioned deputy marshals. A pious man, Brackett knew Spurr’s reputation for strong drink and whoremongering. Spurr thought the wise old Civil War veteran, once an adjutant for Grant himself, probably suspected that Spurr occasionally blurred the lines between what was lawful and what was unlawful in running evildoers to ground.

Even so, the chief marshal always reserved the trickiest, nastiest assignments for the long-toothed veteran, who’d had his federal commission for over ten years but who’d worn several other badges, including county sheriff and town marshal before that. He’d even spent some time in western Dakota as a range detective. Anything to make a living without having to punch cattle who were only marginally more stupid than the men who punched them.

This current assignment looked no different.

It involved a gang known as the Vultures for one, led by the notorious killer Clell Stanhope. Stanhope’s gang had busted their kill-crazy leader out of jail before hanging the executioner who’d been sent to play cat’s cradle with Stanhope’s own neck. They’d executed every man in the posse of the sheriff who’d run him to ground, and they’d kidnapped a whore.

That sheriff was Dusty Mason of Willow City, a small county seat situated about eighty miles north of Alkali Flats. Spurr had dusted trail with the sheriff a year ago when they’d both been tracking a young firebrand who’d broken out of a federal pen in southern Colorado—Cuno Massey. Spurr and Mason had been partnered up for several weeks,
and while Spurr had eventually warmed to the taciturn, steely-eyed lawman a good twenty years Spurr’s junior, Mason wasn’t exactly Spurr’s brand of hombre.

Spurr appreciated a good joke and a soft whore now and then, whereas he’d found Mason relatively humorless and guarded. If he enjoyed a mattress dance on occasion, the sheriff sure hadn’t chinned about it.

Spurr wasn’t comfortable with a man who didn’t admit to a few frivolities, a man who couldn’t bust out with a hearty laugh now and then. The old federal deputy had little time for a man who took himself and life too seriously, for life sure as hell didn’t return the favor, given how the winds of fate blew fickle and rampant, toying with each and every one of us willy-nilly.

Come to think of it, Spurr pondered now as he approached the buildings clustered along the trail ahead of him, he didn’t recollect Mason mentioning if he was even married.

No, sir—there were other men Spurr would rather ride the owlhoot trail with. But the dice had rolled, and he’d been given the assignment of tracking the gang that had all but sacked Mason’s town.

Spurr made a quick appraisal of the buildings around him, most with smoke skeining from their chimneys. He swung left onto the main trail and angled toward the Bighorn Saloon. The watering hole appeared Spurr’s kind of place—a long, low building of splintery logs, with a large sign over its porch roof announcing “cheap women, bubbly beer, a hoedown with fiddles every Saturday night, and free tooth extractions for patrons only!”

Spurr didn’t have a sore tooth at the moment. Only a powerful thirst. But he’d ridden only a dozen yards before voices rose on his right. He glanced toward the large, white, Victorian-style hotel that he’d given only a passing appraisal, as such an obviously “civilized” establishment held little allure for Spurr, and saw a leather two-seater buggy with high red wheels sitting in front of the place. A handsome
Morgan lazed in the traces. A man and a woman—both extremely well tailored—stood on the broad front porch, in front of the door, facing each other.

The man was facing Spurr while the woman was facing the man. Spurr couldn’t see much of the woman except the shape of her head and the set of her shoulders beneath her white straw picture hat plumed with ostrich feathers. But there seemed something familiar about what he could see, as well as in the timbre of her voice, which he could barely hear from fifty or sixty yards away, though there wasn’t a breath of breeze or any other sound around the little town whatever.

Spurr reined Cochise back the other way along the street, staring with unabashed curiosity at the pair atop the porch. He clomped past the buggy, then reined Cochise to another stop at the hotel’s far front corner. The woman was saying, “…Not at all, Olden. You go ahead. Really. I’ll start with coffee, and later, when you get hungry…”

“Are you sure, Martha?”

“Of course I’m sure. Your friends obviously don’t want to meet here.” The woman gave a wry, throaty chuckle as she glanced over her left shoulder, in the direction of the Bighorn Saloon before which three saddled horses stood tied to the hitchrack, one drawing water from the stock trough. “Go on and have your meeting. I’ll sit inside here where it’s cool, and you can come over later for a bite to eat.”

“All right,” Olden said, leaning toward the woman, removing his high-crowned, broad-brimmed, gray-felt Stetson to peck her cheek. He was dressed entirely in gray—a good-quality gray wool—except for his shirt, the white collar of which could be seen just above the lapels of his expensive wool jacket. “I won’t be long.”

“Don’t hurry on my account. I know how Norman enjoys his poker!”

She said that last to the man’s back as he descended the porch steps and headed up the street toward the saloon,
slanting two stiff fingers toward his hat brim to the woman in parting. Digging a cigar out of the breast pocket of his jacket, he quickened his pace.

The hair falling to his collar was snow white, his neck pink as a western sunset behind it, as was the clean-shaven face that Spurr had glimpsed when he’d descended the steps. He was as old as Spurr, most likely. Or nearly so. The woman was younger by fifteen or twenty years, Spurr judged, as he stared at her in open appreciation of her beauty, though he still couldn’t see much of her.

She’d swung full around to stare after the old gent—a successful rancher, judging by his clothes and the buggy and the man’s slightly stiff walk. But the woman’s hair, gathered into a chignon behind her head, was dark brown. Nearly black. Maybe a few stray strands of gray hid amongst the rich, twisted tresses. Her body in her white taffeta dress with its long pleated skirt was straight and fine. Full in all the right places.

Spurr felt a twinge of sadness as well as old regret. The man had called her Martha. Spurr did not recollect any Marthas in his past, but his body was telling him he knew this woman staring rather pensively, maybe a bit longingly at the older gent walking away from her toward his friends in the rough-hewn saloon. Leaving her to entertain herself at the hotel.

No, not Martha…

“Why, Abilene!”