The Murdock's Law (8 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: The Murdock's Law
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“You need those glasses?”
We had been riding side by side for half an hour. The scenery hadn't changed and the silence, together with the constant hammocking between the rolling hills, was stultifying. I'd about given up on getting an answer when he said, “Beats walking into doors.”
“Don't they get in the way of the little holes?”
He turned that over and studied it from both sides before responding. “Holes?”
“The ones you cut in the pillowcase to see through while you're wearing it. It's a mystery to me how you can see to sling a rope over a branch. Or are you the one that holds the horse?”
Our mounts' fetlocks swished through the grass, the only sound for miles. He was either slow or cautious. I had my money on the latter. “You been talking to Pardee.”
I shook my head. “His mind is made up it's Mather's men doing the harassing. I think it's spread around a little more than that.”
“Don't believe I'll say anything more.”
“About time, chatterbox.”
Two hours out of Breen we topped a rise higher than most and the framework of a huge building sprang into view atop a graded hill on the horizon. It was taller than it was wide, towering forty feet over the ranch house sprawled an acre away. The outbuildings in between looked like children's scattered blocks. Here and there across the rippled vastness that separated the Big and Little Belt Mountains, cattle grazed alone and in clumps. Squinting, I could just make out men crawling over the half-finished roof of the skeletal structure like termites.
“That's some barn your boss is building,” I commented.
“Barn, hell.” For once he spoke without hesitation. “That's his new headquarters.”
“What's he need a castle for way out here?”
“He calls it a chateau.” It came out “shat-oo.”
A couple of lanky cowhands were leaning on the corral fence, smoking and watching as a third sidled up to a black mare in the enclosure with a coil of rope in hand, making kissing noises to calm the skittish animal. The pair turned their heads to follow our progress to the ranch house. They were young, but their faces were brown and cracked at the corners of their eyes and mouths from months of squinting against harsh sunlight.
As we neared the long front porch, a maple block of a man came out and rested the barrel of a
Remington rolling-block rifle on the porch railing. He was dressed in colorless jeans and a red-andwhite plaid shirt that had bled pink from too many scrubbings.
“Who we got, Arnie?” His pleasant baritone didn't go with the steel in his eyes. Hatless, he was bald to the crown, but the blond handlebar that swung below his cheeks more than made up for the dearth of hair topside. He looked forty and was probably closer to thirty.
“Who's got who is open to question.” I held up Arnie's English rifle. “Just for the record, though, the name's Murdock.”
He studied me. “I heard you was mean-looking. You don't look like such a much to me.”
“That's what a good night's sleep will do for you. Is he in?”
“To you maybe. Not to all that iron.”
I thrust the foreign rifle into Arnie's hands. He flushed beneath the older man's angry gaze.
“Sorry, Uncle Ed.”
There was a brief silence, and then the other's face clouded suddenly and he clomped off the porch carrying the Remington, reached up and wrenched the English gun out of Arnie's grasp by its barrel. The pretty horse flinched snorting and backed up a step. Its master looked even more frightened.
“You just let two men take it away from you in one afternoon.” The blocky man was breathing heavily, his chest pumping as if from a great effort. “You'll get it back when you learn to hang on to it.”
I said, “Do you do that often?”
“Do what?” He was still glaring at the abashed youth.
“Grab a loaded rifle by the muzzle and yank. I knew a deputy sheriff who used to do that with pistols. He's got a pretty widow.”
He grunted and turned away, carrying the rifles at his sides like buckets of slop. As he walked he swung his left leg in a half-circle without bending the knee. The limp was more noticeable when he wasn't in a hurry. “Wait here.” At the door he turned to nail Arnie again. “You tell Kruger to get someone else to ride line. Man can't drive off rustlers without no gun.” The door banged in its casing.
The boy pressed his thick lips tight and wheeled, kicking yard mud over my roan's flanks as he cantered off toward the long low bunkhouse on the other side of the corral. I dismounted and hitched up to the porch railing. The man with the handlebar came out while I was yanking the tie. He was still carrying the Remington, but he had ditched the foreign piece.
“He'll talk.”
I stepped onto the porch. “Lead the way, Uncle Ed.”
“Name's Strayhorn.” He braced his right foot on the threshold and vaulted the other up and over.
We passed through a shallow entrance hall into a large room with a redwood floor and two large windows in the south wall made of rows of eightinch-square panes that let in plenty of light. Quiltedleather chairs squatted around a fireplace of whitewashed stone big enough for a man to crouch
in. Above the mantel, a painting of Napoleon I on horseback scowled from a heavy gold frame, but aside from that, there was nothing French about the room save its owner.
The Marquis was standing in gartered shirtsleeves and a red silk vest to the right of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back like a St. Louis shoe clerk and Arnie's rifle on a low mahogany table in front of him. His forelock and pointed whiskers looked even more preposterous in these surroundings than they had in my hotel room.
“Dear me, you have had an accident,” he observed.
I'd forgotten about the cheek scratches. “I'll live.”
“In my country, marks like those are considered a measure of one's manhood.”
“In my country they're considered evidence of rape.”
“Oh, but they are not so deep as that. Perhaps just a little rape. Thank you, Edward.”
It was a dismissal, but Strayhorn hesitated. “I still think I should take his gun.”
“Nonsense. Assassination is not Monsieur Murdock's way.” His tone held a sarcastic edge. The other man raked his hard eyes over me as he limped out, still holding the buffalo gun.
“That's a fine rifle,” I ventured, nodding at the weapon on the table. “Balanced like a clock.”
He picked it up and cradled it lovingly. In his small hands it looked like a cannon. “It is a Martini light four hundred, presented to me by the Empress Eugénie at the time I left Europe. At one hundred yards it has a striking energy of one thousand four
hundred and forty-three foot-pounds. It is the only thing of any worth that the English have ever produced, and it comes as no surprise that it was designed by an Italian. The first Napoleon was Italian, you know.”
“As I recall, it was an Englishman who defeated him.”
“Well, you have not come to discuss history.” He replaced the rifle with a startling noise. I had drawn blood.
“I met Pardee last night,” I said. “Terwilliger's foreman. He swears neither he nor his boss sent for Chris Shedwell.”
“Were I in their position, I would swear as much.”
“I believe him.”
“My compliments. Your faith in your fellow man is to be admired, if not imitated.”
“His reasoning was sound. Why were he and his men in town last night to start something with Mather if he'd arranged for Shedwell to balance the account?”
“Then perhaps you can tell me why he is coming?” When I didn't answer he frowned exaggeratedly, pushing out his lips. “Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that Monsieur Terwilliger has not engaged Monsieur Shedwell's talents and that he is coming only to visit his dear mother, assuming that he has one. How does that change anything? The small ranchers continue to swell their herds at the expense of their larger neighbors.”
“How can you be sure they've been rustling Six Bar Six cattle?”
“It is not just Mather's misfortune. The spring
roundup has begun, and already the tallies are falling behind estimates. We expect a loss of a thousand calves. Perhaps more.”
“Estimates based on book count,” I said. “We may be talking about calves that never existed.”
“It would be a very large error, would it not? Unpardonable.”
“Even if you're right, that's a lot of rustling for one man. He wouldn't have any time left to run his ranch.”
“He is not the only small rancher in the territory, monsieur. I do not claim that he alone is responsible for the loss. But he is the leader.”
“Let's talk straight,” I said. “It wouldn't matter if not one calf came up missing or if you found a thousand more than you estimated. You'd just find some other way to justify clearing out the small fry and claiming the open range for yourself.”
I had raised my voice without realizing it. Now I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Ed Strayhorn standing in front of the door with his ever-present Remington in both hands. I backed away at an angle, resting my right hand on the Deane-Adams.
“Call off your foreman.”
“Bookkeeper,” Périgueux corrected. “The leg, you see. But it does not hinder his aim. Please leave.”
“Not until I've said what I came to say. Last night I made a deal with Pardee to let me handle the situation my way. I was going to cut you in, but since you're not interested, I'll say this: if Terwilliger or Pardee or any of their men is hurt or killed while I'm
marshal, even if it's from falling off a horse—hell, even if it's from smallpox—I'll know right where to go. And I'll have help.”
“Are you finished?” asked the Frenchman, after a pause.
“Not quite. I need directions to Terwilliger's spread. I want to ask Dale Pardee about some night riders that have been bothering him lately. You wouldn't know anything about that.”
“I have heard rumors.” He pointed at a framed parchment map on the west wall. It was shaped roughly like a water jug with a chipped neck. “That is my ranch, and that”—he indicated the missing piece—“is the Circle T, belonging to Monsieur Terwilliger, twelve miles west by northwest.”
“That must be like a splinter in your ear.”
“It itches from time to time.
Au revoir
, Monsieur Murdock. That means—”
“I know what it means.” I shouldered my way past Strayhorn.
I hadn't time to ride to the Circle T, interview Pardee's brother, and get back to town before nightfall, so I postponed that trip until morning. Night was the time when all hell broke loose in cattle towns. A mile out of Breen I got out the bottle I'd brought in my saddlebag from Helena for the cold nights and drained the eighth of an inch of colored liquid left in the bottom. The temperature had hovered around thirty most nights, and as I said before it was a long ride. I swung out of the saddle and set up the empty on the spine of a low ridge. It was time I found out how much I could expect from the new gun.
I rode out forty yards, dismounted again, passed the Deane-Adams up and down the length of my sleeve just to hear the cylinder clack around and took aim at the neck of the bottle while the roan, ground-trained but pretending not to be, wandered
off after new grass. Sunlight glared off the smooth glass, but I didn't change my angle. It glares off a man's belt buckle the same way, and he isn't likely to wait while you find a better location.
I stood sideways to the target because I'm harder to hit that way, sighting down the length of my outstretched arm the way they don't in the dime novels, and was squeezing the trigger when the bottle separated into two pieces with a hollow plop. The neck and the base tilted away from each other like halves of a wishbone, and then the shot crashed, its echo retreating toward the mountains like rumbling thunder. I hit the ground for the third time in two days and rolled behind a clump of bramble.
After half a minute I used the barrel of the revolver to part the brush and peered out. To the west, a man on horseback nosed a carbine into a before-the-knee scabbard, smacked his reins across the animal's withers, and came galloping straight at me.
The sun at his back was blinding. Squinting, I hunkered down with my shooting arm resting straight out in the bramble's crotch and waited for him to move into pistol range.
A hundred yards off he reined in and leaned on his fists on the pommel of his saddle. He wore a linen duster over a town suit and his face was in shadow beneath the brim of a black hat I thought I'd seen before.
“Murdock,” he called, his voice rising and falling on the prairie wind, “you are a one for lying down in the middle of the afternoon.”
“You son of a bitch,” I muttered in relief. But I
held onto the revolver. Raising my voice: “Yardlinger, you are a one for asking to get your moustache shot off.”
“Not unless that gun Thorson sold you fires Sharps Big Fifty cartridges.”
I got up, holding it at hip level. Sometimes it pays to look like you walked out of something by Ned Buntline. “Step down and start leading your horse this way. From the left side, opposite the scabbard. I'll tell you when to stop. And keep your hand away from your belt gun.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You don't set much store by friends.”
“I had a friend once,” I said. “He tried to gut me with a skinning knife when I beat his straight with a full house. Move.”
He did as directed, leading his piebald by the bit and holding his left arm straight out to the side like a carpenter carrying a heavy toolbox in the other hand. The rifle on the saddle was the Winchester carbine I'd carried the night before. When he was fifty feet away I motioned him with the revolver to stop.
“Now neither of us has to shout.” I relaxed a little, resting the butt of the Deane-Adams on the bone of my hip. “Start with why you shattered that bottle.”
“Is that all that's biting you?” He smiled, but it died short of his eyes. “I never could resist a target like that. I'm the champion rifle shot of the county three years running.”
I watched him, especially his eyes. At length I sighed and replaced the revolver in its holster. “It was a hell of a good shot.” I wanted to say something
more, to try and restore the good thing that had been growing between us. Instead I said, “What are you doing out here?”
“Looking for you.” His tone was colder than it had been when we'd met. “Pardee rolled into town an hour ago on a buckboard. His brother's in the back. Someone lynched him, and this time they finished the job.”
 
We found the buckboard in front of one of the town's two undertaking parlors. The box was empty but for a coil of rotted twine and about a pound of wet sawdust, wagon stuff. BYRON C. FITCH, MORTICIAN was lettered in gold paint across the parlor's curtained front window.
The interior of the parlor looked more like a cathouse than most cathouses I'd seen. Curtains were drawn across the front window and lamplight sifted dimly over the muted carpet and rows of mourners' chairs arranged in front of a casket on a raised platform draped in black felt. The sweet smell of hothouse-grown flowers enveloped us as we entered.
An old man with wispy white hair brushed back over dry pink scalp and a scowl that had defied the undertaker's best efforts lay in the casket, his head raised on a satin pillow and spotted hands folded across his vest. We took off our hats, as if that mattered any more, and went on past him through a door standing half open into the back room.
Rosy light from the setting sun fell through two small windows high in the west wall, illuminating a cluttered pine bench, half a dozen lidless caskets,
and a naked corpse stretched out on a pair of planks nailed together and propped across a pair of sawhorses. The raw stench of formaldehyde contrasted sharply with the flowery smell in the parlor.
A pudgy man in shirtsleeves who had been bent over the body glanced up and said, “Thank God! Please help Mr. Pardee out of here, Marshal. He's not doing anyone any good, especially himself.” I recognized him as the man I had seen riding shotgun on Marshal Arno's hearse the day before.
Pardee, in rusty range clothes and a Stetson grown colorless from sweat and weather, looked like a man on the wrong end of a long fever. His face was slack and heavy, his eyes hot and sunk deep in purple-black sockets. I almost didn't recognize him without a cigar.
“Look at him.” His voice was so low he might have been praying. “Look at what those bastards did to him.” He was gazing at the thing on the planks.
The dead man was whipsaw-lean, tanned from neck to hairline and from fingers to wrists, and gray-white everywhere else. His eyes bulged, the burst blood vessels in the whites black and twisted like hairs on the lip of a washbasin, and his tongue was a dark swollen thing that had grown too big for his mouth to hold. The rope had burned a blue line around his neck and the weight of his body had stretched it twice its normal length. His clothes had been flung to the floor in a heap.
“Pardee said he was last seen this morning, when he rode north after some strays,” Yardlinger said. “When he didn't show up by midafternoon, Pardee and some of the hands went looking for him. They
found him dangling from a tree a mile inside the Circle T's northwest corner.”
“A mile short of the Six Bar Six.” The foreman's prayerful moan had fallen to a hoarse whisper. “They didn't even bother to tie much of a knot. They just let him strangle.”
“Whose strays was he after?” I asked. “Terwilliger's or Mather's?”
Yardlinger gaped. “Murdock, for God's sake—”
But Pardee was already moving. In one spring he was on me, his big muscular hands squeezing my throat. His eyes bulged like his dead brother's and saliva foamed at the corner of his mouth. I scooped out the Deane-Adams and pronged the barrel deep into the arch of his rib cage. Air whooshed out his lungs, spittle flecking my face. But he held on. My vision turned black around the edges.
I was about to fire when there was a solid
thunk
like an axe sinking into soft wood; Pardee's eyes rolled over white, his hands clutched at my shoulders for support when his grip failed on my throat. I stepped back and he toppled forward, first onto his knees and then onto his hands, where he stayed with his head hanging down.
Yardlinger was standing over him, holding his Navy Colt like a hammer with the butt foremost. When he was sure the foreman's part in the drama was finished he executed a neat spin that ended with the gun securely in its holster.
“Obliged. Not that I needed help.” I put up my own gun the conventional way.
“He was in the right. That was a hell of a thing to say.”
“Maybe. If those strays had turned out to be Mather's, I'd have known where to look for his brother's killer.”
“That won't be a problem.”
“Mather strikes me as smarter than that, knowing we'd suspect him. Unless some of his hands decided to do the boss a favor on their own time.”
“That's Turk all over.”
The undertaker was agitated. “Quick, Marshal, get Mr. Pardee out of here. He makes me nervous.”
“I can see why,” said the deputy. “Your customers don't usually comment on your work.” He'd been watching Pardee, who remained in a daze on his hands and knees. Now Yardlinger looked at the little man. “He had five men with him when I left. Where'd they go?”
The undertaker shrugged distractedly. “They went out right after helping carry in the body.”
I said, “Twenty dollars on where they're going,” and started walking.
Yardlinger called after me. “It'll be dark in a few minutes. You'll break your neck.”
“That'll save Judge Blackthorne the trouble when he hears I let a range war blow up in my jurisdiction. I'll fetch the other deputies. Lock up Pardee and wait for us at the jail.” I scattered empty chairs on my way through the parlor.

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