The High Rocks (3 page)
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
“Why not? This gun holds five cartridges, and I've only fired one. That gives me one to play with.” None of them seemed to have an answer for that.
Henry took control of the conversation. “What's it going to be, Ira? I'm being paid by the month.”
Ira seemed to be having trouble making up his mind. His black eyes shifted, glittering unnaturally in the light seeping in through the grimy front window past the blurred white faces pressed against the panes. “Go away, Sheriff,” he said at last. His voice was pitched low for his age, muddied slightly by his condition. “This ain't your business. Me and my friends are just having some fun.”
“At whose expense? Give me the gun before someone gets hurt.” Henry held out a steady left hand to receive the weapon.
The boy at the far end of the bar snatched at the butt of his gun and I shot him. The bullet struck his left shoulder just below the collarbone, spun him around, and slammed him into the cracked mirror, bringing a cascade of glittering shards showering down around him. His revolver somersaulted from his grip and glided along the polished surface of the bar until it reached the edge, from where it dropped to the plank floor with a thud. In the same instant I recocked the Deane-Adams and brought it to bear on his two companions. They threw up their hands, shaking their heads frantically. The one closest to me still held the neck of the bottle my first bullet had shattered in one hand.
The wounded youth stood with his back against the wreckage of the mirror, his right hand gripping his left shoulder, blood oozing between his fingers. His face was dead white.
“Three left,” I told him, unnecessarily. His gun was beyond his reach and all the fight was gone from him.
I glanced in Henry's direction and was surprised to see that he was standing there alone. At his feet sprawled Ira Longbow, a purple bruise swelling on his left temple where the sheriff had brought the barrel of his six-shooter smashing against the half-breed's skull. The youth's gun lay two yards away where it had landed after leaving his hand. Henry wasn't paying any attention to him. He was busy sighting down the muzzle of his Peacemaker and scowling.
“Bent the barrel, damn it,” he growled.
“You should've used the butt,” I told him. “Indians got hard heads.”
Now that the danger was past, the room began to fill with people. The sheriff showed them his gun and they backed off, leaving a clearing around the scene of destruction. He fished a shining coin from his coat pocket and tossed it to a young boy dressed in threadbare homespun, who caught it in one hand. “Go fetch Ezra Wilson,” Henry directed him. “Tell him we got a wounded man here. Hurry!” The boy took off at a run, his leather worksoles clapping on bare wood.
“What happened to Doc Bernstein?” I asked.
The lawman regarded me dully for a moment, as if he'd forgotten all about me. “He's dead. A small raiding party led by Two Sisters hit his place last year and burned it to the ground. They found Doc in the front yard and skewered him with a war lance. His wife and boy were in the cabin when they put the torch to it.”
“Oh.”
Ezra Wilson was a gray little man whose features, once out of sight, were impossible to recall. They were crowded in the middle of a face that seemed to grow straight out of his detachable collar with no neck in between, broader at the top than at the bottom and crowned by a head of washed-out red hair parted in the middle and pomaded to the extent that it looked as if he hadn't grown it at all, just painted it on with a thick brush. He walked like a crab and carried a cylindrical black bag like a doctor's. He was Staghorn's barber.
“See what you can do for him, Ez,” said Henry, indicating the young man with the hole in his shoulder.
I watched as the barber directed the youth to take a seat in one of the few unbroken chairs and removed his vest and shirt. The wound was as large as a baby's fist and glistened with blood, but no bone had been touched that I could see, there being no chips visible.
“Passed clear through,” piped Ezra, reaching into his bag and withdrawing a bottle of alcohol and a
roll of gauze, items most likely appropriated from the late Doc Bernstein's effects. He proceeded to clean and dress the wound, not too gently. The young man whimpered and bit his lip a lot.
roll of gauze, items most likely appropriated from the late Doc Bernstein's effects. He proceeded to clean and dress the wound, not too gently. The young man whimpered and bit his lip a lot.
“Why'd you do it?” I asked the patient. I had collected the guns from all the parties involved and heaped them on what was left of the table in front of me.
“I recognized you suddenly.” The petulance was still in his tone, tempered by pain. His breath came in gasps. He probably thought he was dying. I would too, after a quarter of an ounce of lead had slammed through me.
“So what?”
“You're Page Murdock. Everyone says you're fast. I wanted to see how fast.”
“The hell with fast,” I said. “I already had my gun out. Anyway, Henry Goodnight's faster than I am; why didn't you try to take him?”
“I wasn't out to commit suicide.”
“So instead you collected a bullet in your shoulder.”
He shrugged, then regretted it. “I'm still alive, ain't I?”
“You're damn lucky. I was aiming for your belly.”
The barber finished dressing the wound and stood back, wiping alcohol off his hands with a broad white handkerchief. “What you want done with him now?” he asked Henry.
The sheriff looked at me. “You pressing charges?”
“If I do, does it mean I have to stick around for the trial?”
“You know it does. You're wearing a badge. Carrying one, anyway,” he corrected, noticing that I wasn't sporting one of the tin targets Judge Black-thorne handed out.
“Forget it,” I said. “Chalk it up to high spirits and let him go. Without his gun, of course.”
“Of course.” There was a sneer in Henry's tone.
“You might as well turn the others loose too, if you've a mind. They haven't done anything but watch anyway.”
The lawman holstered his damaged weapon. Taking this as a cue, the two youths who had emerged unscathed from the shoot-out helped their wounded companion to his feet and left, supporting him between them.
“You'll get paid, Ezra,” Henry told Wilson. “I know the boy's parents.”
Bart Goddard came loping into the room, head down, barrel torso tilted forward, nearly bowling over the barber, who was on his way out. The face beneath the mop of dry white hair was crimson. He took in the damage with a sweeping glance. “Who's gonna pay for all this?” he demanded.
Henry shrugged.The fate of his six-shooter had put him in a sour mood. “You'll have to talk to Ira about that after he sobers up.” He caught my eye. “Give me a hand getting him over to the jail.”
That wasn't as easy as it sounded. The half-breed couldn't have weighed over a hundred and twenty, but it was all dead weight and raising him to his feet was the most physical labor I'd engaged in for some time. When at last we had him supported between us, Goddard glowered at him from beneath the heavy mantel of his brows.
“There ain't enough wampum in this old man's whole tribe to take care of what he done today,” he said.
Henry said something to him that for reasons of delicacy I will leave out of this narrative, and together we trundled our burden across the street to the jail.
The warmth put out by the little iron stove hissing away in a corner of the sheriff's office was a welcome change from the damp chill of the street. It was still September, and already the first icy blasts of winter were making their presence felt at that high altitude. Old-timers whose sole purpose in life was to predict the weather were laying odds that the region was in for yet another severe winter, perhaps the harshest yet.
The jailhouse was the second that had been built on that spot since Staghornâ²s founding fifty years before. The first, a log affair with a sod roof and no foundation, had perished within two years of its construction when a prisoner set fire to his mattress during an escape attempt and the flames spread to the walls, eventually engulfing the entire structure and killing the arsonist. In its place rose a stone
building with steel bars on the windows and thick wooden shutters with gun ports in the centers which could be swung shut and locked in the event of a siege from outside. The office, a rectangular enclosure separated from the four cells in back by a flyblown wall, was furnished with two straight chairs and a desk with a scaly finish created by too many layers of cheap varnish. Its top was a litter of dog-eared wanted circulars and telegram blanks, many of which were soiled with coffee rings. A chipped enamel coffee pot, once white, now blackened at the base and up one side, gurgled insistently atop the stove and boiled over, its contents sizzling upon the iron stove top. The smell this made was harsher than burning hides but not as acrid as spent gunpowder. In any case, it was not an appetizing aroma.
building with steel bars on the windows and thick wooden shutters with gun ports in the centers which could be swung shut and locked in the event of a siege from outside. The office, a rectangular enclosure separated from the four cells in back by a flyblown wall, was furnished with two straight chairs and a desk with a scaly finish created by too many layers of cheap varnish. Its top was a litter of dog-eared wanted circulars and telegram blanks, many of which were soiled with coffee rings. A chipped enamel coffee pot, once white, now blackened at the base and up one side, gurgled insistently atop the stove and boiled over, its contents sizzling upon the iron stove top. The smell this made was harsher than burning hides but not as acrid as spent gunpowder. In any case, it was not an appetizing aroma.
We went through a thick oaken door at the back of the office and deposited Ira Longbow in the cell nearest the door. The one opposite was already occupied. I studied the face and form of the man stretched out on the cot through the bars and checked them against the description on the wanted circular I'd been carrying in my hip pocket. Short, squat, black hair thinning, prominent jaw, incongruous button of a nose permanently reddened by a lifetime spent chugging cheap whiskey. Pointed ears. Mean little eyes. Forearms as big around as my calves. It was a perfect match. Leslie Brainard, the Helena teamster who had strangled his wife to death in an argument over money.
“That him?” asked Henry.
I nodded. “I'll grab a good night's rest over at the Castle and pick him up in the morning. I've earned that much.”
“Just so you get him the hell out of my jail. He's the most unaccommodating prisoner I've ever had.”
“What's this situation with the Flatheads?” I asked him, when the connecting door was shut and we were back in the office.
He unbuckled his gun belt and draped it over a wooden peg beside the front door. “It's Bear Anderson again,” he said. “Every time he takes a scalp, Two Sisters uses it as an excuse to go on another raid. Usually he confines himself to horse-thieving and looting. Doc Bernstein and his family were the first white casualties in years. It's coming to a head fast. The army's trying to get the Flatheads to sign a treaty, but they aren't going to get anywhere as long as Anderson's still up there.”
“Which means they won't ever,” I said.
Henry eyed me curiously. “You know him, don't you? I forgot.”
“I grew up with him. I'll bet Bear and I explored every cave and crag in those mountains as kids. To get him down, they're going to have to find him first. Then they've got to take him. That's a job I wouldn't hand out to my worst enemy.”
“Funny you should say that.”
The voice wasn't Henry's. It was thin as a razor and marked by a high Ozark twang, something like
a bullet ricocheting off a rock. My back was toward the front door. I turned.
a bullet ricocheting off a rock. My back was toward the front door. I turned.
The voice's owner was as thin as the voice itself, and short enough to walk under my outstretched arm without ducking. Even so, the outsized hat he wore, together with a yellow ankle-length duster, made him seem even smaller than he was. His face was ordinary except for a crossed right eye that even when it was looking straight at you appeared to be focused on something beyond your shoulder. His nose was prominent but not gross, his hair, what I could see of it beneath the broad brim of his sweat-darkened hat, the color of wet sand and long enough in back to brush his collar. Sandy whiskers, some twelve or thirteen days old, blurred the lines of his chin and emaciated cheeks.
He had two men with him, who looked enough alike and had enough years separating them to be father and son. Both wore their hair long, the old man's dirty gray compared to the younger man's brown, and their clothes, neutral in color beneath a skin of dust, were trail-worn and frayed at the cuffs, collars, knees and seats. Their eyes were small and close-set above huge hooked noses, beneath which their faces fell away to scrawny necks with hardly any chins to interrupt the sweeping lines. They were cleanshaven, or had been until about two weeks before. The young man wore steel-rimmed spectacles and had a long-barreled percussion cap pistol stuck in his belt. The oldtimer carried no weapon that I could see. Saddle
tramps, both of them, with just enough of a furtive look about them to be wanted for something.
tramps, both of them, with just enough of a furtive look about them to be wanted for something.
“Who are you?” I asked the man in the duster.
“Name's Church.” When he spoke, he had a habit of grinning quickly with all of his white, even teeth, but it was more of a nervous habit than an expression of emotion, as nothing he said seemed humorous. “These here are Homer Strakey, Senior and Junior.” He tilted his hat brim in the direction of his companions. “Which one of you is Sheriff Henry Goodnight?”
“I'm Goodnight,” said Henry, cautiously. He edged nearer his six-shooter hanging on the wall. “What's your business?”
“They told us over at the saloon you got a breed name of Longbow locked up in jail. I'd like to bail him out.”
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