Massacre Canyon (5 page)

Skunk Creek, Wyoming

 

The town lived up to its name, Luke thought as he walked the dun along the settlement's muddy main street. A cold rain sluiced down and dripped from the low-pulled brim of his hat. But even in the rain, which usually washed the air clean, the place smelled bad. Something about the seeps along the edge of the creek that ran behind the buildings, he supposed. Didn't really smell like polecat, but it was bad enough on its own.

He wore a slicker, but of course the stubborn rain had found ways to worm trails under the oilcloth and soak his regular clothes. That meant Luke felt cold and clammy and wanted nothing more than to find a nice hot fire to sit beside, so he could dry out some and warm his bones.

Instead, there was a good chance that in the next twenty minutes he would either have to kill somebody . . . or be killed himself.

It was only the middle of the afternoon, but the thick gray overcast made the sky look like dusk. Because of that, the lamps were already lit in most of the buildings along either side of the street in the block where Skunk Creek's business establishments were located. The windows showed up as yellow rectangles in the gloom.

One of those businesses was the Panther Saloon. A while back, somebody passing through Skunk Creek had recognized the bartender there as Andy Eggleston, who was wanted for fatally gunning down a deputy marshal during the getaway from a botched bank robbery in Rawlins, Wyoming Territory, a year earlier. Eggleston must have believed that Skunk Creek was far enough away from Rawlins to be safe, but he was wrong about that.

The man who had recognized him had told somebody else, who had mentioned it to somebody else, and eventually the news had drifted to Luke in Cheyenne. He recalled having a poster on Eggleston in his saddlebags, and when he dug it out, he saw that the bank had put an eight hundred dollar reward on the would-be robber's head. The town council had added a couple of hundred to it in order to make the total an even one thousand dollars. That wasn't bad.

Of course, he wouldn't need a bounty like that if all the rewards due him for the capture of Mordecai Kroll would come through. As usual, though, the banks and railroads and state and territorial governments were taking their own sweet time about paying him. If a fella owed money to any of those places, they wanted it right then and there, and you were in trouble if you didn't pay up.

But when the dinero was supposed to go the other way, it was a different story. Then it was,
Risk your life killing or jailing this no-account bastard for us, and we'll get around to paying you for it when we're damned good and ready.

Those thoughts were running through Luke's mind when he spotted the Panther Saloon up ahead on the left. The letters on the sign nailed to the front of the awning over the boardwalk had faded, and the dim light of the rainy day made them even harder to read. Once Luke made them out, though, he angled the dun in that direction.

“Soon as I'm finished in there, we'll find you a nice, dry stable, old-timer,” he said.

The dun flicked an ear.

The saloon had bigger front windows than most of the buildings, but they were so dirty that not much light filtered through them. At this time of year the double doors at the entrance were closed, instead of being open with just the swinging bat wings in them. A couple of benches where idlers could sit and spit and whittle when the weather was nice flanked the doorway.

Three miserable-looking saddle mounts with their heads drooping were tied up at one of the hitch rails. Out of habit, Luke checked the brands as he reined the dun to a stop. All three horses were from the Block K. He had never heard of that spread, but he assumed it was a ranch somewhere not too far from Skunk Creek. Three of the hands, unable to do any real work because of the weather, had ridden into the settlement to pass the afternoon, he supposed.

He dismounted and grimaced as his boots sank into the mud. They came loose with sucking sounds when he stepped up onto the boardwalk after looping the dun's reins around the hitch rail. In an effort to get some of the mud off, he stomped several times as he headed for the doors, but the sticky stuff clung stubbornly.

He was sure this wouldn't be the first time somebody had tracked mud into the Panther Saloon.

Before he went in, he leaned his head forward to let more collected rain water drain off his hat. He unbuttoned his slicker and flapped it to shake off some of the moisture, and not coincidentally, to give him easier access to his Remingtons. With that done, he grasped the knob of the left-hand door, turned it, and went inside.

The air outside was chilly and dank, but inside the saloon the atmosphere was hot and oppressive. He'd be lucky if he didn't catch his death of the grippe, thought Luke . . . if he didn't get holes blown in him during the next few minutes.

The heat came from a pair of big potbellied stoves in opposite rear corners of the low-ceilinged room. The bar was to the right, with a tarnished brass rail running along its base and several spittoons sitting in front of it. Half a dozen mismatched tables were scattered haphazardly to the left. In the back was a small open space for dancing and an old piano that probably hadn't been tuned since Stephen Foster was a boy. Nobody was around to play the piano, and there wasn't a woman in the place as far as Luke could see, so the dance floor was going unused, too.

Only one of the tables was occupied. The three cowboys who went with the trio of Block K horses outside sat there with a bottle of whiskey on the table between them. They were doing some serious drinking, apparently, and concentrating on the job at hand, so they barely glanced at Luke as he came in and closed the door behind him.

The man behind the bar was tall, with thinning blond hair and a beard. He wore a soiled apron over a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal the sleeves of a set of red long-handled underwear. He had an empty glass in his right hand and used a rag in his left hand in an attempt to polish it. The glass had too many greasy fingerprints on it for the rag to do much good.

The beard was new, but other than that, the bartender looked just like the picture on the wanted poster Luke had folded up and put in his shirt pocket. The paper might be a little damp now, but it would still be legible.

The bartender nodded and said, “Nasty day out there, ain't it, friend?”

“It is indeed,” Luke said. “Longfellow claimed that the best thing a man can do when it's raining is to let it rain.”

The bartender frowned slightly.

“Can't say as I know the gent you're talkin' about, but he's right. Can't do a blamed thing about the rain except try to stay out of it.”

“Which is exactly what I'm doing,” Luke said. “Can I get a beer?”

“Sure.” The man filled a glass mug that was also heavily coated with fingerprints and slid it across the hardwood. “Four bits.”

Luke dropped coins on the bar and picked up the mug. The beer was as bitter and tasteless as he expected it to be, but at least it cleared his throat a little.

“Don't think I've seen you in Skunk Creek before,” the bartender said as he went back to his futile glass polishing.

“I just rode in,” Luke said.

The man laughed.

“I hope you're just passin' through. There's not much here worth stayin' for.”

“You own this saloon?”

“Naw,” the bartender replied with a shake of his head. “Just work for the old man who does. He's got the rheumatism, so he don't get around very well anymore, especially when the weather's damp like this. But I don't have anything else to do, so I don't mind runnin' the place pretty much full time.”

He held the glass up to the light, studied it for a second, sighed in defeat, and set it aside. Then he stuck out his hand.

“Harvey Lawdermilk's my name.”

“Now that's funny,” Luke said as he took the man's hand. “Ever since I came in the door, I've been thinking that you look familiar to me, but that's not the name I put with your face.”

Alarm lit up in the man's eyes as Luke suddenly tightened his grip.

“I would've sworn you were Andy Eggleston,” Luke went on.

The bartender tried to pull away, but Luke jerked him forward over the bar and at the same time reached across his body with his left hand and palmed out the Remington in the right-side cross-draw holster. He brought the gun crashing down on Eggleston's head.

Eggleston collapsed across the bar. His arm hit the mostly full mug of beer and sent it sliding off to crash on the floor in front of the bar. Luke leaned back and hauled harder. Eggleston wound up sprawled senseless on top of the bar.

Luke heard chair legs scraping on the rough floor and glanced over his shoulder to see the three cowboys starting to their feet with startled expressions on their beard-stubbled faces. He swung the Remington in his left hand in their general direction and said sharply, “Sit back down, boys. There's nothing going on here that you need to be involved with.”

“But you walloped Harvey!” one of the men exclaimed.

“Are you holdin' up the place?” another asked.

“Now, if I were an outlaw I think I could find a more lucrative place than this to rob,” Luke said. He took the folded reward dodger from his pocket, shook it a couple of times to straighten it out, and held it next to the face of the unconscious “Harvey Lawdermilk” to be sure he was the same man.

“Son of a bitch!” the third cowboy said. “That's Harvey on that ree-ward poster.”

“That means he must be an outlaw,” one of the other men said.

“That's right,” Luke told them. With that explained, he holstered the revolver and reached for one of the rawhide strips he carried so he could tie Andy Eggleston's wrists behind his back before the fugitive came to.

One of the cowboys said slowly, “That means . . . you must be a bounty hunter, mister.”

“Right the first—” Luke began.

The sound of guns being cocked interrupted him.

He glanced over his shoulder, saw all three cowboys pointing revolvers at him, and dived for cover just as flame spurted from gun muzzles and shots began to crash like thunder.

Bullets smashed into the bar and sent splinters flying where Luke had been standing a hairsbreadth of time earlier. He sprawled full length on the sawdust-littered floor, which stunk of spilled beer and rotgut and vomit. A quick roll carried him against the legs of the nearest table as more slugs chewed into the floorboards next to him.

He grabbed the table legs and heaved. The table overturned and provided a little cover for him as he yanked one of the Remingtons from its holster. He had no idea why the three cowboys from the Block K were trying to kill him, nor did he care.

As more bullets thudded into the overturned table, he thrust the Remington around the side of it and triggered two shots. He couldn't tell if he hit any of the cowboys, but the flying lead was enough to make them scatter.

One man headed for the nearest potbellied stove which would have made good cover if he had reached it. He was a little too slow. Luke snapped a shot at him and drilled him through the thigh.

The wound made the cowboy lose his balance and pitch forward as his leg folded up under him. His arms went out instinctively and wrapped around the stove, embracing it as a man would a lover. His face rammed against it, and he screamed as the heat cooked and blistered the skin of his face and hands.

The other two men had turned over a table of their own and crouched behind it as they hammered shots at Luke. The table he was using for cover had taken a lot of damage. As it began to splinter and come apart, several slugs punched all the way through the wood and whistled perilously close to Luke's head.

He holstered his gun, grabbed a couple of the table legs, and surged to his feet. Holding the table in front of him like a battering ram and yelling at the top of his lungs, he charged across the room toward the men trying to kill him. The unexpected attack startled them enough that they stopped shooting for a second.

That gave Luke enough time to crash his table into the other one and knock it back against the two men, who sprawled on the floor from the impact as wood snapped and cracked. They wound up lying on their backs with the wreckage of two tables on top of them, along with Luke's weight.

He rolled off and drew both guns as he came away to his feet. A quick step and a swift kick knocked the gun out of one man's hand. Luke pointed a Remington at the other man's face and eared back the hammer.

“Throw it away!” he rasped. “Now!”

The man did so, sliding the gun a good ten feet across the dirty floor. Luke was breathing hard, and he was mad. The cowboy must have realized he was only a slight pressure on the trigger away from getting his brains blown out.

Luke backed off. His left-hand gun covered the two men lying in the debris of the broken tables; the right-hand gun pointed toward the cowboy lying beside the stove, moaning in agony from his burns.

“Crawl out of that mess,” Luke told the two men he had just disarmed. “Stay away from your guns. Make a move I don't like and I'll kill you.”

“Sure you will,” one of the men said as his face twisted with hate. “That's just what a damn, no-good bounty hunter would do!”

“I'm going to ignore that for the moment, as long as one of you tells me what the
hell
is going on here!”

“Ain't you figured it out by now?” asked the man who had spoken up. He and his companion stood together, their arms half-raised. “We're wanted.”

Luke narrowed his eyes and stared at them. He didn't recall ever seeing either man before, or their likeness on a wanted poster, either.

“So that's why you tried to kill me? You thought I was after you?”

“You come in here, pistol-whip Harvey, haul out a wanted poster of him and admit that you're after blood money.... What in blazes were we supposed to think?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Luke said. “Maybe that I was after
Harvey
, you idiots!”

The second man looked over at the one who'd been doing the talking and said, “He's got a point, Rance. If we'd just kept our mouths shut, this gent likely would've taken Harvey out of here and left us alone.” His eyes widened as something else occurred to him. “Then we could've helped ourselves to all the booze in the place!”

“Shut up!” Rance said. “How was I to know? I mean, those stolen Block K broncs are right outside. He had to've seen 'em.”

“You shouldn't be talkin' about stolen broncs. Didn't you hear the fella say he didn't know nothin' about that?”

“He already knows we're outlaws, you fool! We tried to blow holes in his hide!”

“Because you said we oughta!”

Listening to those two wrangle was actually a little entertaining, Luke thought, but he wasn't really in the mood for it. The fact that the third man was lying on the floor a few yards away with his face half burned off sort of put a damper on the humor. The burned man had fallen silent now, which told Luke he had probably passed out from the pain.

“Go pick up your friend and tend to him,” Luke said. “And while you're at it, tie up Eggleston.”

“Who?”

“The bartender. The one who's been calling himself Harvey Lawdermilk. His real name's Andy Eggleston. He tried to rob the bank over in Rawlins and killed a man getting away.”

“Harvey done that? Dang, he seemed like such a nice friendly fella.”

Luke waggled the right-hand Remington.

“Go on and do what I told you.”

“You're takin' us all in?” Rance asked.

“That's the general idea. I'll get your names once you're tied up.”

“You really don't know who we are? You wasn't after us?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, boys,” Luke said, “but you brought this on yourselves.”

Both men wore expressions of total disgust as they went to help their friend.

 

 

Skunk Creek was too small to have a jail or even a local lawman. The blacksmith had a sturdy smokehouse, though, and he was willing to rent it to Luke so that it could serve as a temporary lockup. The price was a little exorbitant, but Luke figured he had no choice but to pay it.

The settlement didn't have a doctor, either. Luke got some lard from the café and rubbed it on the burned man's injuries. That was all he could do for the unlucky varmint.

He didn't feel too sorry for any of the cowboys. It had been their choice to start shooting at him.

By the time all that was taken care of, night had fallen, and it was a dark night indeed because of the overcast. The rain had tapered off, but it was still a steady drizzle as Luke went back to the café to get something to eat.

The woman who ran the place had graying red hair and was built like a tree stump. She wasn't very friendly, but she was a decent cook, Luke discovered when he sat down to a meal of steak, fried potatoes, and greens. The peace cobbler with which he followed it was even better.

“Is there a hotel or a boardinghouse in this town where a man can get a room for the night?” he asked the proprietor.

“In Skunk Creek?” The woman laughed. “Nobody stays overnight in Skunk Creek unless they have to, mister. Hell, none of the people who live here would stay if they had anywhere else to go. What you can do, though, is ask the Swede down at the livery stable if he'll let you sleep in his hayloft. If he ain't been drinkin' enough to feel argumentative, he'll usually let travelers do that.”

Luke nodded and said, “I'm obliged to you.”

“I'd let you spend the night at my place,” the woman said, “but you're not really my type. No offense, but I like men who are a little younger and better-looking.”

Luke chuckled and said, “None taken. Although with cooking like this I'd think you'd have more suitors than you could handle.”

“Ain't no such thing, mister. Ain't no such thing.”

Still smiling, Luke headed for the livery stable a few minutes later, leading the dun. The poor horse had been standing in the rain for a couple of hours. He needed a nice warm stall, a good brushing, and some oats or grain. A dry hayloft didn't sound bad to Luke, either.

The mud still sucked at his boots with every step. As he approached the livery barn he saw that its big double doors were closed, but a line of light came through the little gap between them and told him that a lantern was lit inside.

The doors weren't latched or barred. He grasped the one on the left and pulled it open enough to take the dun inside. Light spilled around them as they entered.

A stocky, broad-faced man with a shock of blond hair stood inside, fiddling with some harness. He nodded to Luke and asked, “What can I do for you, mister?”

The Scandinavian accent wasn't strong, but it was enough to confirm that this was the Swede, Luke thought. He said, “I need accommodations for my horse and for myself as well. The woman at the café said you might be willing to let me pitch my bedroll in the loft.”

“Oh, yah, sure. There are some bugs and rats up there, but not too many, mind.” The man didn't look up from whatever he was doing with the harness. Luke tried idly to figure it out but couldn't really tell. “There's an empty stall right yonder. You can put your horse in it. I'll get to him in a few minutes.”

“All right.”

The hair on the back of Luke's neck prickled a little as he led the dun into the stall that the Swede had indicated. He had gotten a sudden hunch that something wasn't right here, but he couldn't tell what it was. The Swede certainly seemed harmless enough, despite his preoccupation with that bit of harness.

Luke unsaddled the dun, dried him with a rag he found hanging in the stall, and carried his bedroll and Winchester back into the aisle between the rows of stalls.

“You're that bounty hunter fella, aren't you?” the Swede asked, still without looking at him. “The one who shot up the Panther Saloon.”

“The gunplay wasn't my idea,” Luke said. He was getting a little irritated now by the liveryman's attitude. “I had captured the man I was after without firing a shot. It was those other three hombres who decided to turn it into a gunfight.”

“That'd make you Luke Jensen.”

“Yes, what—”

Luke stopped short as he realized that he hadn't told anyone in Skunk Creek his name. That meant someone else had given it to the Swede. Someone who had to be looking for him.

He dropped the bedroll and brought the rifle up as he heard a rush of footsteps behind him. The Swede dropped the harness he had been pretending to fiddle with and dived for the open door of his office. Clearly, he wanted to get out of the line of fire.

Luke whirled as several figures lunged from the thick shadows deeper in the barn and charged at him. He got a shot off with the Winchester, but couldn't tell if he hit any of his attackers. Before he had a chance to work the rifle's lever, a couple of men crashed into him with diving tackles and knocked him off his feet.

He landed with bone-jarring force on the hard-packed dirt of the aisle. The impact jolted the Winchester out of his hands. He reached for one of the Remingtons, but a booted foot slammed into his ribs and rolled him onto his side, trapping that hand. More kicks rocked him and sent pain exploding through his body. A boot heel caught him in the temple and made the world blur and spin crazily.

“Remember, don't kill him!” a man's voice ordered. “We need him alive!”

“But we can bust him up some, right?” another man asked.

“Oh, yeah. Bust him up. Make him pay for what he did.”

Luke hadn't even caught a glimpse of any of their faces. He didn't know who they were or why they were doing this.

But given his line of work, he had made plenty of enemies over the years. Obviously, one of them wanted some special vengeance on him; otherwise, the attackers wouldn't be under orders to keep him alive. If it had been a simple matter of revenge, they would have gone ahead and killed him.

That was the last coherent thought he had. Everything after that was a blinding tide of pain that carried him away to oblivion.