The Murdock's Law (9 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

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We clattered down the freezing, shadow-splashed street at full gallop, five men on wild-eyed horses loaded down with iron, a hellish sight for the curious who had come out to see what the commotion was about. Of the two rifles left in the rack I had chosen a Henry for myself and made Cross give up his shotgun for a Spencer. Yardlinger, who held on to the Winchester, informed me that Earl and the Major knew their way around handguns well enough to do without. The old man, who had no horse of his own, had commandeered one from the livery. Our destination was the Six Bar Six.
Clouds boiled past the moon, merging the solid black of trees lining the road with the smothering wrap of the night itself. The horses were frightened and let us know with whinnies drawn thin as threads of molten silver. Vapor billowed from their nostrils.
The air was as cold as the water in a mountain stream.
Yardlinger rode point as guide. At first I had nothing to go by but the feel of his piebald's backdrifting breath on my face, but as my eyes caught up with the darkness I was able to make out his lanky form in the saddle. Now all I had to worry about was the occasional chuckhole in the road, which could splinter a horse's cannon like green wood.
Time stands still at night. It might have been five minutes and it might have been an hour before we heard a crackling in the distance, as of someone crumpling brittle parchment. There was no telling from which direction the sound of the shots had come. I slowed to a canter and finally to a walk, barking at the others to do the same.
“What we doglegging for?” Earl wanted to know. “You got a bet on how it'll come out?”
I ignored the sneer in his tone. “We won't get there any faster on dead horses.”
“He's right. Shut up,” said Yardlinger.
We alternated between cantering and walking while the animals' sides heaved and their spent breath enveloped us in a shroud of moist warmth. Meanwhile, the distant crackling continued in fits and starts, now pausing, now erupting again in flurries so rapid it was impossible to count the individual reports. It sounded unreal, like fake gunfire onstage.
The horses smelled it first and passed it along to us in exhausted snorts and the dozen other noises they make when approaching a place of rest after a hard
ride. It reached us a moment later. I stood in the stirrups and drew in a double lungful of the familiar, faintly pleasant odor redolent of hundreds of nights spent around stoves and campfires. Woodsmoke. I was about to call it to the others' attention when Yardlinger grunted and I looked ahead to see a red glow fanning out across the western sky.
I'd seen something like it once before, riding with Rosecrans' cavalry on the way to hell at Murfreesboro. Coming out of a patch of woods, we had spotted the fires of a Confederate encampment reflected in the low-hanging clouds six miles away. It looked like the sun getting ready to rise, and it only happened when there was a lot of flame …
We pushed our mounts the rest of the way. Even so, we were a long time getting there, too long. We heard men shouting and horses screaming and more shots raggedly spaced, and then we heard nothing but the splitting and popping of wood being consumed by fire.
Too late
, said the hoofbeats beneath us.
Too late, too late.
Then we thundered over a rise and were there.
The blaze had passed its peak, but coming straight from darkness I had to shield my eyes against the glare. Flames were slurping at the charred framework of what had been a large barn, clinging to the corner beams, and crouching along the rafters like hordes of magpies stuffing their swollen bellies long after the carcass had been reduced to gristle and bone. An occasional horseman flashed past and was swallowed up in darkness. There was galloping around us, two or three shots fired at nothing in
particular, and then there was nothing at all, just the noise of the fire sating itself. I spurred the roan in that direction, fighting it all the way.
“Murdock! Stay back!” Yardlinger's voice was strident. “The barn's coming down!”
The heat on my face was blistering. My mount fought the bit and reared. I threw all my weight onto its neck, and when its forefeet touched ground I swung out of the saddle, landing flat on my heels with a jar that sent sharp pains splintering up my legs. The roan nearly knocked me down with its shoulder as it spun to get clear of the flames and smoke.
Yellow tongues lapped and stuttered at the doomed wood, flicking illumination this way and that. I was alerted to a chilling sound nearby, half snort and half whistling whimper, and saw a horse kicking and thrashing on its side in the barn's blazing doorway, a mass of charred, flaming flesh still fighting for life. Its eyes were gone and its lips had burned away to expose grotesquely leering teeth. I put a bullet in its head from the Deane-Adams. It arched its neck and flopped to the ground like a trout landing, emptying its lungs with a sigh and thrusting its legs in four directions.
The air next to my right ear split with a sharp crack, simultaneous with the deep report. On the edge of the firelight leaned a wagon with a broken wheel; in the right triangle of darkness beneath I spotted a blue phosphorescence on the fade and fired at it, darting for shadow even as I loosed the shot. I waited, but no bullets answered. Instead I heard a voice.
“Don't shoot! I'm wounded.”
It was a young voice, breathless and cracking.
I said, “Can you stand?”
I heard grunting and struggling. A pause. “No.”
Major Brody was standing just beyond the circle of light, which glinted orange off his Peacemaker's sight. “Cover him,” I snapped.
“You bet, Cap'n.” He cackled shortly. “Don't make no moves I might regard as hostile, young feller. I'm mostly owl and a little bit bat. That means I can see in the dark.”
I circled around and came up on the wagon's blind side, stifling a curse when I tripped over a bulky object on the ground and almost fell. It was a man's body. I bent down, groped for his collar, and pressed my fingers against the big artery on the side of his neck. It was just a useless tube now. I crept around the corpse.
As I drew near the wagon, the flames found an unburned section of rafter and flared up greedily, lighting the space under the broken-down vehicle. The man lay on his left hip, his left arm stretched out along the ground ending in a revolver and his right leg thrust in the opposite direction. His pants leg was slick with blood where he was gripping it with his free right hand. His face was turned toward the Major.
When the light died, I took two long strides and, going by memory, stuck my left foot under the wagon on top of his gun arm and reached sideways and down to clap the muzzle of my revolver to his temple. He stiffened, then struggled to free the trapped arm, but I leaned into it and he gave up.
“Please don't shoot me, mister,” he begged again. “I think my leg's busted.”
Brody spoke up. “Who's your boss? Turk or Pardee?”
There was no answer. The old man spat. I heard the tobacco splatter the wagon's sideboards. “You called it, son.”
“Don't shoot!” I put as much authority into the command as I could muster. The old night rider was in his element and I wasn't sure he could be controlled. “Not unless you want to swing right here.”
It made him pause. Skeptically: “You'd do that? A U.S. marshal?”
“Deputy,” I corrected. “And you're damn right.”
Some more time passed. Finally I heard the slide and click of the Colt's hammer being replaced. Going into his belt the gun made a creaking sound like tightly gloved fingers curling into a fist.
I said, “Fix up some kind of torch and bring it here.”
We were left in darkness for several minutes. The wounded man's breath moved in and out sibilantly, fluttering from time to time and catching whenever a spasm of pain shot through him. I heard Yardlinger shouting to Earl and Cross to check out each of the other outbuildings, neither of which had been touched by fire. It was like listening to an argument in the next hotel room, of interest to me but none of my business.
I was beginning to wonder what had happened to the Major when a ball of flame separated from the dying blaze of the barn and bobbed our way, his bowlegged figure hobbling beneath it. At that moment
the roof fell in with a noise like a bundle of laundry striking the floor from a great height. Bright orange sparks swarmed upward for a hundred feet and vanished. A corner post tilted, hung motionless for a couple of seconds, and toppled away from the inferno, crunching when it struck ground. Brody didn't even turn to watch. I guessed he'd seen his share of burning buildings.
“I soaked a loose stave in a barrel of coal oil I found back of the barn,” he said, squatting to grin at us from the other side of the wagon. His stubbly face was smeared black with soot.
“What do you want,” I retorted, “a Johnny Reb medal? Hold it steady.”
He cackled again. I never found out if he did that out of habit or for effect. “I still like you.”
The wounded man was one of the horseback riders we'd confronted with Mather in Breen the night before. I pried his Navy Colt out of his grasp, stuck it in my belt and lifted my boot from his wrist. He rubbed it with his other hand, bloody from nursing his own wound.
“I'm Murdock.” I leathered the Deane-Adams. “You remember me.”
He looked at me, blankly at first, and then he nodded. He had brown hair and pimples. “I remember. I thought you was one of them bushwhackers. That's why—” He sucked air through his teeth and gripped his leg.
“Let's have a look at that.”
I got down on one knee and gently lifted his hand from the pants leg, stiff with gore and glistening in the torchlight. “Got a knife?”
The Major handed me his, a slasher with a hidewrapped hilt. I used it to slit the material from knee to thigh and pulled it apart. Bits of white bone showed in a wound as big as a doorknob. I covered it hurriedly.
“It's broken.” I didn't tell him how badly. “We'll get help.”
“Help's here.”
I looked up. A man was standing behind the Major with his back to the flames and a lever-action rifle in both hands, trained on us. Brody dropped the torch and went for the revolver in his belt.
“I'll blow your heart out the wrong side.” The deep voice was so calm there was almost no threat to it. Almost. It sounded familiar, but I'd heard too many new voices in the past couple of days to sort them out. The Major let his hand drop from the Peacemaker's butt.
“Who is it?” I demanded.
“Turk.”
“It's all right, Abel,” broke in the wounded boy. “They ain't with the bushwhackers.”
“Then whose bullet is that in your leg?”
There was no answer.
I said, “He fired at me. I fired back. I didn't know if he was with you or Terwilliger.”
“Terwilliger.” Turk dragged out the name, giving each syllable more than its full value. “I figured it was him.”
“I don't know that he was with them. They're friends of Pardee's. Someone lynched his brother today. I don't guess you'd know who.”
“You ain't in a position to be asking questions.” The rifle barrel was a foot away from my head.
“I'm not in a position to do much of anything, least of all save your cowhand's life. He'll bleed to death if you don't let Brody pick up that torch so I can finish what I started.”
The fire crackled behind him. “All right, go ahead. Just don't move too fast.”
“Mister, I got to move fast.” When the torch was lifted, I took the kerchief from around my neck and twisted it around the boy's thigh just above the leaking wound. The bleeding slowed. “Where can we take him? Someplace with a bed and not too many stairs to climb.”
“The main house,” said Turk. “I'll fetch help.”
He left, to return a few minutes later with four men in faded denims and bulky cowhide jackets, two of them carrying something that looked like a door. I placed one of them among those I had seen in town last night. The others were strangers.
“The door's from the coal shed,” the foreman explained. “We can use it for a litter.”
It was slid under the wagon next to the boy and two men took positions on either side. The boy gasped during the transfer but didn't cry out. Meanwhile I supported the leg, and when the litter was slid out into the open and lifted, I went along to hold the tourniquet while the Major bore the torch and Turk led the way.
I kept the boy talking to keep his mind off the pain. He explained that the ambushers had struck while the hands were on their way to the bunkhouse
for supper, firing the barn and hurling lead at the men as they scattered for cover.
The main house was a big log structure a couple of hundred yards west of the smoldering shell of a barn. No attempt had been made to disguise the logs, which brought up my opinion of Dick Mather ten percent. The Major ditched the torch and we carefully levered our burden around a shallow, L-shaped entryway and through a spacious room with a sputtering fire and Indian rugs on the walls into a small ground-floor bedroom. A stout woman in a plain blouse and floor-length floral skirt made way for us, babbling away in bastardized French. That, together with her dark round face and flat Indian features, identified her as one of the half-breed Canadians who supplied most of the domestic labor in the region.

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