The Murdock's Law (16 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

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Randy Cross met me coming around the corner from Arapaho Street. Beyond him, the main four corners were a jam of men and horses. Light from the windows slid along the oily barrels of rifles and shotguns and sparkled off modest raiments. Metal rattled, leather creaked, animals snuffed and blew. Steam curled around the mounts' fidgety legs like locomotive exhaust. Some of the men were carrying torches, and black smoke columned up from the flames and merged with the darkness above. The scene smelled of tobacco and burning pitch and sardines. A number of the volunteers had filled their pockets with stores in anticipation of a long ride.
“I been looking all over for you,” complained the deputy. The ride to the ranch and back had sobered him. “I got your posse.”
“So I see. How many?”
“Fourteen's all I can spare.” The stout man I had seen at the Pardees' funeral called down from his perch astride a big sorrel. The brim of his slouch hat touched the hook of his nose and he was huddled in a coarse woolen overcoat cut for a much larger man, the sleeves turned back and the tails spread to cover his saddle. His stirrups were adjusted as high as they would go to accommodate his short legs.
“Who's running the ranch, Mr. Terwilliger?” I asked.
His fierce eyes smoldered in the shadows. “It was your business, maybe I'd say.” He had a thin voice for his build, and his tone was Midwestern flat. “You're Murdock? You know none of this'd be necessary, you let Pardee treat with Mather when he wanted to.”
“I'm not so sure Mather was behind the raid. Or the lynching.”
“You got a dead horse with the Six Bar Six brand. What more you need?” His nervous excitement passed to his horse, which scooped its neck and danced from side to side. The rancher seemed to be holding the animal in check by no other means than sheer force of presence.
“May I speak to your men?” I asked him.
He took a beat to consider, then nodded abruptly. In my absence Cross had saddled and bridled my roan and brought it from the livery to hitch to the riddled rail in front of the Pick Handle. I slipped its tether and mounted, then trotted out in front of the others. They had been conversing among themselves in growls, but lapsed into silence when I appeared. I pinned on the star.
“This isn't a vigilante raid,” I announced, after introducing myself to a chorus of muttered obscenities. “You're to be sworn in as special deputies. That means you'll take my orders and no one else's. It doesn't give you leave to commit murder. We'll fire if fired upon, but if not, we'll give the men we're after a chance to surrender before we start busting caps. Who objects to that?”
“Me.” This from a lean horseman near the center, with cracks for eyes and a trailing moustache that completed the oriental effect. “Why should they get any more chance than they gave Dale Pardee?”
Agreement rumbled through the group.
“Ain't you the one killed our foreman?” challenged a voice from the rear. The rumbling grew loud. I urged the roan forward into the flickering torchlight. The noise died.
I addressed myself to the oriental-looking cowhand, whom I had picked out as the spokesman for the group.
“Pardee gave me the same treatment his brother got. I'm not his brother.”
He said nothing. I raised my voice to take in the group. “I was told when I came here you wanted law. You don't get it by trampling over it when it doesn't suit you. Any man not in agreement with that is free to leave. If you decide to stick, I'll make holes in the first man who goes against me.”
“Whose law is that?”
A new voice, deep in the assembly. I couldn't locate the owner.
“Mine.” The roan started fiddle-footing. I squeezed my thighs together and it settled down.
“One thing more. There's reason to believe Abel Turk is leading these night riders, not Mather. For sure Turk's with them. I know an experienced gunman when I see one, and it's only safe to assume he's surrounded himself with others as good. If that bothers you, go now. No one will think poor of you.”
I stopped talking. The riders stirred, spoke to each other in murmurs that rose and died like sounds coming from a crowded room as a door swung open and shut.
“You sure Turk's part of it?”
The question had come from the porch of the Breen House, where a lanky figure was outlined dimly between the lighted windows. I couldn't make him out but I knew Shedwell's brogue.
“Fairly,” I said. “Why?”
He stepped forward. His coattails were flung back to expose his guns. “I'll be one of your deputies. Unless you got objections.”
Some of Terwilliger's crew recognized the mankiller. His name buzzed through the gathering.
“Get your horse,” I told him.
He struck off toward the livery, moving with an easy lope. “What about it?” I asked the others. “Any dropouts?”
Terwilliger kneed his horse into the space in front of the cowhands, facing me. “My men don't shy from a fight, Marshal. Swear away.”
When Shedwell returned straddling a bay stallion, I had everyone raise his right hand and recite the oath I'd heard often in Judge Blackthorne's chambers when new officers joined the fraternity. The
words didn't vary a lot between the federal and local levels and didn't mean much of anything anyway. After the “I do's” I said, “Kill the torches. No sense advertising,” and led the way in the direction of the night riders' retreat. The dead raider had been removed from the street, which explained the light in Fitch's undertaking parlor.
We made good time until we reached the point where our quarry had left the road to ride across country, after which we had to stop from time to time and dismount until someone picked up on matted grass or a similar sign of recent passage. Moonlight is deceptive. We wasted precious minutes following false trails that dead-ended where the fugitives had doubled back on themselves to throw us off. Finally we came to a spot where the tracks stopped heading north and turned east.
“That ain't the way to Mather's spread,” Terwilliger reported.
“Could be another sour lead,” suggested Cross.
“I doubt it.” I pointed to a spattering of dark spots on the beaten grass. “Whoever's bleeding has been doing it for miles. They're running out of time for clever tricks.”
“How many of them are there, you reckon?” asked the rancher.
“Shedwell got the best look at them,” I said.
“Eight.” The gunman looked thoughtful. “Nine. I was sort of preoccupied.”
I frowned. “Looked like more.”
“Could be. Like I said, I didn't keep no tally.”
“Think Périgueux knows they're on his land?” Terwilliger asked.
“It wouldn't surprise me.” I clucked the roan into motion.
Half a mile farther on we came upon a bundle of clothing dumped alongside the trail. The horses were downwind of it and shied as we approached. It wasn't a bundle of clothing. I stepped down and turned it over with my foot.
The front of his shirt was black and glistening in the pale light. An empty scabbard like the kind cavalry officers wore was hooked to his belt. I remembered Major Brody saying he'd gutshot the man who had tried to lop off his arm. He wasn't wearing a pillowcase now. I recognized him as one of the men I had seen at the corral near Périgueux's headquarters. I felt his neck.
“Still warm,” I said, mounting. “We're gaining.”
An hour later we topped a rise overlooking several sections of undulating grassland. Nestled in a furrow between swells was a wooden line shack with a slant roof and a covered window with a gunport where the shutters met, left over from the Sioux wars. A brush tail flicked into view from beneath the roof of the lean-to stable in back and was gone. We withdrew below the ridge.
“Might be a decoy,” Cross whispered. “They got a horse to spare now.”
“If they've got wounded, they'll need shelter,” I said.
“If they got wounded.”
I considered. “I'm betting on the shack, but let's make sure. Circle around on foot. Stay low. If there's only one horse in the stable, fire a shot in the
air and wait for us. Otherwise come back and report. Just a second.”
The deputy had started off in a crouch. I clutched his sleeve. “If you start anything without orders, I'll kill you.”
His eyes glittered in their slits but he said nothing. I let him go.
The rest of us stood around listening to each other's breathing. The prairie wind came up at ragged intervals, humming through the grass and plucking at our hat brims so that we had to hold on to them with both hands, but for the most part nothing moved. Even the moon seemed nailed in the sky. At last we heard Cross's heavy footsteps in the frost-brittle grass.
“There's nine horses.” His breath came in shallow, excited bursts.
“Fan out,” I said. “Surround it. No one fires till I give the word.”
Cow horses all, the animals held their positions from the moment the reins touched earth. I kept Shedwell with me and divided the men between Cross and Terwilliger, thus balancing the command. When we were alone, the gunman and I crawled to the crest on our bellies. I had the Winchester from the office, he a Spencer repeater with a folding sight. I noted the moon's position.
“Sun will be up in about an hour. We'll call them out as soon as it gets light.”
He made no reply. In the hollow, the lonely shack cast a shadow solid enough to trip over. Miles away a coyote hurled its sad challenge at the moon.
I blew on my fingers and worked the stiffness out of the joints. “Where do you know Abel Turk from?”
“Centralia, eighteen sixty-four.” He was watching the shack.
“You were riding with Quantrill then.”
“Anderson.”
“Was Turk a guerrilla?”
“He was second in command.” His voice was low. “We'd been picking Centralia all morning and was feeling pretty good. Along about noon we stopped the train from St. Charles and ordered everybody out. There was twenty-five armed Yanks aboard, going home on furlough. We lined them up and made them strip to their flannels. Anderson found out one was an officer and ordered him out of line. Then he told Turk to muster out the rest.”
The broad brim of his hat drenched his face in darkness. His breath curled in the brittle air.
“I was pretty fresh then,” he said. “I thought that meant Anderson was going to turn them loose. I laughed to think of all them bluebellies hobbling down the tracks in their long handles and stocking feet. Then he started shooting at them.
“He blasted away with a pistol in each hand, and Yanks fell like dominoes. Some of them tried running and went down with holes in back. One blubbered and stuck out his hands like he thought he could stop the lead. There was this yellow-haired sergeant that let out a roar and charged Turk when he was reloading. Turk didn't hurry. He finished and shot the sergeant twice in the chest and once in the
neck, and even then he had to step back or the Yank would of fell into his arms.
“By this time we was all shooting, me included. It wasn't hard at all. You'd be surprised how easy it was when everyone else was doing it too. Thing is, I don't think any of us could of touched it off except Turk. When it was over, the only Yank left standing was the brass-buttons Anderson took out of line.”
He chuckled dryly. “Old Bloody Bill, he did hold a soft spot for brother officers.”
We listened to the coyote again, farther away this time, the mournful note warped by distance. When it had ended I said, “Is Turk the reason you came to Breen?”
He didn't answer. We waited in silence for the sun.
It's quiet at that time of year, with no crickets singing or bugs thumping through the grass. We lay there watching the shack while the cold sniffed at us and crept down our collars and up our pants legs and lay like metal against our skin. Even the faraway coyote had ceased crying. I warmed my hands in my armpits and creaked my toes in my boots when they grew numb. The grass crackled when I changed positions. Shedwell didn't move a hair.
For a long time I watched a leaden sliver on the eastern horizon before it lost its hard edge and melted into the black that surrounded it, spreading with the painful slowness of a bad dream drawing to a close. The sky bled gray, then pale blue, and then a wedge of red sun appeared like a raw wound in the Little Belts. The shadow cast by the line shack shifted and shortened, becoming more dramatic as coppery light washed the foothills.
I waited while the sun cleared the mountains and its glare grew less direct. Then I gathered my legs beneath me and, squatting on one knee, drew a bead on the shuttered window. Beside me, Shedwell remained prone, supported on his elbows, with the Spencer trained on the door.
My own voice surprised me, booming out over the hills after so much silence and bounding off the tall rocks to east and west. “Surrender” continued to ricochet long after I finished speaking, altering its shape each time it struck until it was just a grumble in the distance, then a whisper, then nothing. More minutes passed before my answer came screaming straight at me and buried itself with a
whump
in the earth at my feet. Blue smoke slid sideways from the port in the shutters.
“Open fire!” On “fire” I squeezed one off, levering another into the chamber and shooting again even as the silvery tinkle of collapsing glass reached me. The door jumped in its frame as Shedwell's bullet smashed through the weathered wood.
Reports crackled across the surrounding hills. Balls of smoke were blown elliptical and shredded by the mounting wind. Pieces of shingle flew from the shack's roof. Lead whined off solid objects inside and clanked against ironware. The horses in the exposed stable screamed and kicked at the posts supporting the roof, the impacts sounding like small explosions even at this distance.
The men trapped inside returned fire sporadically. A black snout would poke itself through the port, sneeze fire and smoke, then withdraw as more bullets chewed at the shutters. Reports from the
opposite side testified to the existence of at least one other window. Meanwhile, hurtling bits of metal hammered the weatherboard. I remember thinking of a magician I had once seen in St. Louis who shut a pretty girl up in a box and proceeded to thrust swords through the sides at all angles, and I wondered now, as I had wondered then, how anyone could survive such an assault. But the answering fire continued.
I was reloading when the shutters and door burst outward simultaneously as if a powder charge had gone off inside. Four men spilled out, arms and legs uncoiling like loosely baled rags as they struck the ground and straightened running, revolvers and rifles blazing. Bullets tore up grass all around me.
The one who had come through the door, working the lever of a Henry now and backing with the others toward the stable, wore a dark beard. Turk. Shedwell recognized him too, but before he could take aim the earth heaved in front of his face, spraying dirt into his eyes. He cursed and rubbed at them with his fingers.
I chambered a cartridge and got a bead on Turk just as he darted around the corner of the shack. My bullet splintered wood. One of the men who had leaped out the window was down, spread-eagled on his stomach with his six-gun still in his hand. Seconds later two horses bolted from the stable, their riders hugging their necks bareback. I fired and one horse went down with a scream. Its master leaped clear. It was Turk again.
I had him in my sights when his partner swung his horse around and crossed in front to give him a hand
up. Someone on the other side squeezed off at the same time I did. The rider arched his back and slumped forward. Turk pushed him off and mounted in the same movement. He was a hundred yards away before his rescuer stopped bouncing. Dark geysers erupted around horse and rider. They disappeared over a hill, and when they came into view again atop the next they were well out of range. A number of desultory shots were hurled after them nonetheless.
Then it got quiet.
I waited for the appearance of the fourth escapee. When he didn't show I assumed one of the others had gotten him. I learned later that the others were thinking the same thing on our side. The missing man would be found draped over the hitching rail, where he had succumbed to a wound suffered while still in the building.
I asked Shedwell about his eyes, red-rimmed now and blinking. He waved the question aside.
“Turk get clear?”
I said he had. “He'll head toward Périgueux's for supplies and a fresh mount. It's closer than Mather's house.”
“Don't shoot!”
The shout came from the shack, where moments later a rifle and two revolvers flew out the open door in order and landed on the ground twenty feet away.
“We're unarmed!” The voice was hoarse and desperate. “We're coming out!”
“Hands on your heads!” I shouted.
I gave the order to cease fire. Two men staggered out the door one after the other, hands clasped on
top of their heads. The second man was limping. Blood slicked his right pants leg to the knee. I called for them to halt and stood up. Brass casings tinkled from my lap to the ground.
“What about the others?” I kept them covered.
The uninjured man answered. His hair and short beard were snarled as if he'd just risen from bed.
“One's dead. The other, almost. He got it in the lungs and he's coughing up bloody pieces. That's it.”
I called for Cross. There was a pause while his name banged around the mountains, and then a solid figure rose from the ridge on the other side of the shack. He waved the Spencer he'd taken from the rack at the jail and started down the slope. Terwilliger and his men followed suit. I was waiting for them when they got to the building, having taken possession of the prisoners and their discarded weapons. As he was closing in, Cross pivoted suddenly and smashed his rifle stock across the wounded man's face.
I dropped the confiscated guns and lashed out even as the man fell, catching the deputy full on the chin with my left fist. This was the same hand I had used to silence Colleen and Earl. I felt tiny bones snapping when it connected. My bones.
He staggered back a dozen steps, roared, and brought up the office Spencer. I sailed a bullet past his ear from the Winchester before he could pull the trigger.
“I don't miss twice,” I barked, when it looked as if he was going to try again. He dropped his arm. Blood trickled out a corner of his mouth. I turned to Shedwell. “Can you handle things here?”
“You handle them,” he said. “My business is with Turk.”
Terwilliger was roughly helping Cross's victim to his feet. The night rider's nose was broken and bleeding copiously. “You're in charge,” I told the rancher. “Try and see that no one gets lynched while we're gone.”
The sun was clear of the peaks and losing its bloody color when Shedwell and I rode within view of the massive skeleton of the Marquis' new chateau. The numbness had worn out of my left hand, and each time the road lurched, tiny bursts of pain shot straight up my arm. In spite of this we drove our mounts hard for the next half hour and thundered into Périgueux's yard just as Turk was emerging from the ranch house.
In his arms he cradled a bedroll bulky with foodstuffs. A sleek dun was ground-tethered by the corral, saddled and ready to run. We drew our revolvers and fired over its head. It whinnied, reared and took off at a mad gallop toward the hills, reins flapping.
Turk dropped his bundle and answered with his Smith & Wesson, backing away fast. I'd never seen anyone get a gun out that quickly. A furrow appeared across the horn of my saddle, exposing dull lead under the leather. Shedwell circled to the end of the porch and whipped his horse up onto the boards, ducking to clear the roof and block that line of retreat. We had him between us now.
The foreman sank into a half-crouch, swinging his gun to cover us both as he backed toward the corner of the house. I danced the roan in that direction,
herding him in the other direction like a contrary bull.
My hat was snatched off my head by a bellowing explosion from above. Startled, I glanced up and met Ed Strayhorn's gaze at an upstairs window, behind the sight of his big Remington rifle. I'd completely forgotten about Périgueux's bookkeeper. I snapped off a hasty shot before he could take aim again. He ducked behind the wall and the window frame splintered.
A battering ram struck my chest. My horse reared and I cartwheeled from the saddle, turned over with agonizing slowness as in a terrifying dream, and stopped suddenly with an impact that dwarfed the first. What breath I still had left me with an animal grunt.
When my senses returned I raised my head to look for my horse and pain tore through me. I laid it back down, but not before noting that my shirt front was clotted with gore. I knew I was dying. I had seen what a bullet from a .44 could do to bone and muscle too many times to believe otherwise. Vaguely, not too far away, I heard a series of reports, a pause, and then one more. The last one carried the finality of an exclamation point. I remember thinking that that was important, then reminding myself that it wasn't, not any more, not to me. I could hear the squishy sound of blood pumping through the hole in my chest.
I may have blacked out. In any case, I don't recall any other thoughts until I heard a crunching and Chris Shedwell moved into my field of vision. His expression was grim and he was plodding like a man
in the final stages of exhaustion. His right arm hung limp at his side with the Remington revolver dangling at the end. His other hand was clasped to his rib cage, where a red stain was spreading around his fingers. He stopped, looking down at me, and opened his mouth to speak.
A shot rang out, very close. His mouth opened a little wider along with his eyes. For a long moment he remained like that, back arched, elbows drawn in, and then the gun dropped from his hand, his knees buckled, and he fell out of my line of sight. Behind where he had been standing I now saw young Arnie Strayhorn holding the rifle his father had taken from him until he could show he deserved to carry it. The last thing I was aware of was his thin, bespectacled face wreathed in blue smoke.

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