The Old Wolves (26 page)

God, what smooth, supple, tender skin.

She pulled her head away from his. Her eyes had a coy, smoky cast. The corners of her mouth rose as she scuttled down his body slightly, lowered her head to his chest, and kissed him, rolling her face around in the tangle of hair along his breastbone.

Spurr's breath came raspier. He grew warmer. His pecker grew harder.

She continued to drop lower and lower on him until he felt her hair raking like satin across his nether region, and then he felt the warm moistness of her mouth closing over him. He groaned as he drew another breath deep into his lungs, felt his heart quicken. He chuckled at the thought that this girl might finally drive him over the edge, kill him.

What the hell. What she was doing to him down there—oh, so excruciatingly slowly and gently, using her tongue as much as her lips—caused him not to care about one other damn thing in the world. For the first time in a long time, he didn't feel the darkness of an open coffin resting at the edge of a coal-black grave staring him in the face.

She finished him and cleaned him with a sponge and then they slept curled together like a pair of cats in the sun, oblivious of the cacophony rising from the street outside the hotel.

Someone hammered Spurr's door twice loudly.

Spurr sat bolt upright in bed, reaching for his Starr .44 until he remembered that he foolishly hadn't wrapped the cartridge belt and holster around the bedpost on the bed's right side, like he usually did. Greta gasped and sat back against the headboard, holding the bedcovers over her breasts.

Boomer's voice thundered on the other side of the door. “You two awake in there?”

He didn't wait for a response. He threw the door open and entered the room, a large shadow standing at the foot of the bed, bending his head slightly toward Spurr and Greta. “I just figured out what ole Keneally was sayin'. He was sayin', ‘Sins of the father.'”

“Sins of the father?” Spurr and Greta both said at nearly the same time.

“Last night, from down in the canyon—that's what he was yellin',” Boomer said, his voice quaking with emotion. “That dung beetle's goin' after my daughter!”

THIRTY-TWO

Spurr tossed his covers aside, leaving Greta covered beside him, and dropped his feet to the floor.

While Boomer stood at the foot of the bed, cursing under his breath and wringing his hands together, the old lawman lit the lamp on the dresser. He splashed whiskey into a water glass and handed the glass to Boomer.

“There you go—drink that. Settle you down. You been havin' a nightmare, Boomer.”

Aware of his nakedness, Spurr looked around for his longhandles. Boomer threw half the drink back. “Ain't no nightmare. I been layin' there next door, hearin' you two carryin' on, and then for some reason I got to thinkin' about that last thing Keneally yelled up the ridge at us. Sins of the father.”

“What's this about a daughter?” Spurr said as he stepped into his balbriggans.

Boomer looked around, closed the door, and sat in a chair in a corner near the foot of the bed. The chair squawked beneath his weight. He leaned forward, scrubbing a hand through his thin, tangled hair. He wore only his balbriggans, socks, and knotted neckerchief.

“Didn't know I had one, neither,” he said, “till a few years ago. Her mother sent me a letter before she died of a cancer back in Missouri, told me about Sonja. Said I sowed the seed before I lit out buffalo huntin' an' we first met up, Spurr. Before we headed to Texas and the Brasada country.
Before
the banker.”

“What the hell are you—a Brahman seed bull?”

“Anyways, the girl—Sonja—was married and had a family in a little mining camp called Longmont.”

“That's just south of Camp Collins,” Spurr said. “Been through there many times.”

“I was through there once, a few months after Mayleene sent me the letter about her dyin' and about the daughter I had and didn't know about. I met her—Sonja. She's got a good man, a good family, but they're dirt poor an' her boy, Irvin—their only child—has some sort o' bone defect, can't walk too good.”

“I don't understand,” Greta said, holding her covers to her breasts with one hand and throwing her hair straight back over her head with the other hand. “What does . . . ?”

“Sonja's got the money. I sent it to her after that last holdup and then I headed into the Medicine Bows to try to throw Keneally and the others off my trail.”

Spurr ran a skeptical hand down his patch-bearded face, blinking uncertainly as he studied the one-eyed man before him.

Greta said, “How does Keneally know about Sonja?”

“When I visited her, I told Keneally and the rest of the gang about her. About havin' a daughter I never knew about. Shit, that ain't something a man wants to keep under his hat. I had to tell someone, and them fellas was
my
fellas then. My gang. I told 'em about it.”

Boomer bounded up from his chair, eye wild. “And Keneally figured out I sent her the money! At least, he guessed right, goddamnit!” Boomer tossed the last of his drink back and threw the glass against the red-and-gold-papered wall behind Spurr. The glass struck the wall with a ringing boom and shattered and rained to the floor.

“Boomer!” Spurr said, glancing back at the mess. “You're gonna get that Bertram bat on our asses!”

Boomer looked at Spurr, his lone eye dark and grave. “We gotta get to Longmont, Spurr. We gotta leave right now. Tonight. They got a day's head start, and it's only a three-, four-day ride. They'll kill Sonja. They'll kill her whole family!”

Spurr leaned back against the dresser, thinking about all that Boomer had told him.

He shook his head. “We won't be able to rent horses tonight, Boomer. Even if we could, it's too damn dark to ride this broken country. We'd likely injure one of the horses and cook our gooses worse than they already been cooked.” Again, he shook his head. “No, we gotta wait for morning. We'll stock up on supplies then, too.”

The old outlaw stood stoop-shouldered before Spurr, glaring at the old lawman. “Sonja—she don't care for me. But she's all I got. I'll find a horse tonight if I have to steal one. I'll be pullin' out. You do what you have to do, Spurr.”

With that, Drago opened the door and strode into the hall, leaving the door half open behind him.

“Goddamnit, Boomer,” Spurr said when he was gone. He ran a hand over his face, blinking his eyes in frustration. “Shit!”

“I reckon we don't have no choice,” Greta said, throwing the covers back and dropping her feet to the floor.

“I reckon I don't have no choice.” Spurr stood holding his britches in one hand, pointing at the girl with the other. “You, young lady, are staying here. No more trailin' for you!”

Doing nothing to cover herself, she whipped an exasperated look at him. “Bullshit! I started this trail, and I aim to ride to the end of it!”

Haughtily, she picked up the blanket she'd dropped earlier, wrapped it around her shoulders, and stomped across the hall to her own room, the door of which she slammed behind her.

Knowing he'd lost another battle, Spurr merely cursed again and continued dressing.

* * *

“How much for that one there?” Spurr asked the mercantiler, whose name was Lloyd Gault. “That Winchester on the rack yonder.”

“That one's twenty dollars,” Gault said crisply.

Spurr had found the man in one of the saloons with a whore on his knee, and he wasn't happy about having to open his shop this late at night, nearly midnight and in the middle of the town's still-rollicking celebration of Satan's demise.

Not only was Gault grumpy, he was bleary-eyed from drink. It had appeared he'd been about to take the whore upstairs when Spurr had found him, so he was chewing that frustration, as well.

“Haul it down here an' let me take a look at it.”

“You sure you can afford that weapon?” Gault asked with a weary, impatient air, looking Spurr up and down. “It's the latest model, and I won't come down on it!”

“Haul it down here!”

When Gault had climbed from a stool onto the back counter lit by two hanging lanterns, and plucked the Winchester from its rack mounted beside a buffalo bull's head, he climbed down off the stool and set the gun on the counter. Spurr didn't bother to inspect the weapon, nor the slightly older model already lying on the counter beside it and the two gunnysacks he'd ordered the mercantiler to stuff with trail supplies, including a cook pan and a coffeepot.

“All right, I'll take a hundred rounds of .44 shells, and then you can tally me up,” Spurr said.

Gault rested his fists on the counter and eyed Spurr skeptically. Outside, the raucous celebration could still be heard. Umber light from the bonfire over which the bear had been cooked danced in the dark street.

“You must be headed for the high country, eh? For the winter? Gets mighty cold up there, an' you . . . well, frankly, you look like you might be better off down here where the snow don't get so deep an' the fires burn a little warmer.”

Spurr glanced out the window at the front of the store. Drago and Greta were fetching the three of them horses from a livery barn and, probably, another peeved businessman. They'd be here soon to load up the trail supplies. Spurr looked at Gault and scrunched up his eyes that were still discolored from his broken, swollen nose. “Mister, will you just tally up the damages for me, so I can get out of your hair and you can get the hell out of mine?”

Gault sighed and reached for his notepad.

“You got the whiskey, didn't you?”

“Yes, I got the whiskey,” Gault said, resting his hand on a bundle sitting near a jar of cinnamon sticks while he began penciling the figures on a notepad.

Spurr rummaged around in his pockets until he found a government pay voucher. Gault wasn't happy about the voucher. Most businessmen weren't, and Spurr didn't blame them, because they had to go to the work of paying for postage to send the voucher to Denver for reimbursement, which usually took months. Nevertheless, by the time Drago and Greta clomped up to the mercantile from the west, trailing a saddled livery mount for Spurr, the old lawman and Gault had hauled the gear he'd purchased out onto the mercantile's front porch.

“You get rifles?” Drago asked, swinging down from his saddle.

“Yes, I got rifles. One for each of you. I'll stick with the Starr. I don't understand how Winchester has remained in business, grinding out the crap he has!”

“Plenty of ammo?”

“Plenty of ammo. Now, will ya shut up and help me get this stuff on the horses before I change my mind and go back to bed an' sleep till morning?”

“Good lord,” Gault said from the porch as Spurr and Drago began tying the gunnysacks to their rented saddles on their rented horses, “are you taking that poor girl out on the trail this late at night?”

“It's all right,” Greta said, strapping one of the gunnysacks over the bedroll behind her saddle. “I'm here by choice. I wouldn't trust these two fellas on the trail by themselves. No tellin' what kind of trouble they'd get into.”

“Say, don't I know you?” Gault said. “I thought I recognized you before. Didn't you work up at Diamond Fire for Reymont an' Chaney?”

Greta shut the man up with a look. “That was a long time ago, mister. I'm done with that awful place.” She slid the new Winchester into her saddle boot, hardening her jaws as she added, “I'll be powderin' a fresh trail soon, just as soon as I take care of some unfinished
business.
”

THIRTY-THREE

Cliff Merriam worked the action on the brand-new Winchester repeater, holding it up close to his ear, almost tranquilized by how smoothly the hammer and the trigger and the springs in the housing between them worked together. The impressive piece had a stimulating smell—at least stimulating to a man like Cliff Merriam, who had never owned a new gun in his life.

That smell was newly forged iron, gun oil, and the varnish coating the walnut stock.

Cliff eased the hammer back down to the firing pin and held the gun flat side up in front of him, gazing admirably at the brass-chased receiver and the scrolled factory engraving.

“Nice gun—eh, Cliff?” said the owner of the Longmont Mercantile and Feed Company, George Canfield, who was dusting off the tops of the flour, meal, and candy barrels running along beneath the big windows at the front of the store.

Merriam's eight-year-old son, Irvin, stood near Canfield, leaning against one of the barrels, taking his weight off his game right leg over which he was forced to wear a steel brace. The boy was eyeing the rock and chocolate candy in the barrels before him.

“Dang nice,” Merriam said, studying the gun, feeling his heart quicken. His hand wrapped around the gun grew warm.

“Winchester continues to produce the best rifles on the market.” Canfield continued running his feather duster across the barrels. “Shall I wrap it up for you?” He chuckled. “Sorry, can't take credit for it. Not on one of the new Winchesters!”

Canfield laughed again.

Cliff felt his face heat up, peeved by the mercantiler's snide demeanor. He knew Canfield wasn't trying to be a smart aleck. With good reason, Canfield didn't think that Cliff Merriam—a poor shotgun rancher with a small spread northwest of town, in the shadow of Longs Peak, could afford such a prized weapon. Few men except for the half-dozen larger ranchers in the county could afford the new Winchester. Certainly not those of Cliff's ilk. Not one with a boy who'd been born with a bone disease and needed to see a doctor in Denver every few months and would probably require surgery on his leg soon.

“Wrap it up for me.”

Canfield continued dusting, his back to Cliff.

“Wrap it up for me,” Cliff repeated. “And I'll take a box of shells for it.”

Canfield looked over his shoulder at Cliff, his dark brows forming a bull's horns of surprise. His lips quirked up and down, as though he wasn't sure if he was being toyed with. “You're not serious.”

“Sure, I am.” Cliff looked at Irvin, who had turned around to stare down the mercantile's center aisle in wide-eyed shock at his father. “Son, what kind of candy would you like?”

The boy just stared at him, lips parted, looking especially frail in the wool coat that was a hand-me-down from the neighbors, and which was still a size-and-a-half too large for his slender frame. The thick red scarf his mother, Cliff's wife, Sonja, had wrapped around his neck didn't help matters. He wore a rabbit fur cap with ear flaps, and that and the scarf nearly hid his pale, rosy-lipped face. The boy looked like he'd topple under all that weight at any moment.

“Canfield, give Irvin a sack. Boy, you fill it half full, all right? That oughta get you through a week or two of candy-chewin', as long as you go easy.” Cliff winked at his beloved son and pressed a finger to his mustached lips. “Let's make this our secret—all right? No tellin' Mom. She'd likely take the strap to both of us.”

“You mean it, Pa?” Irvin said.

“I wouldn't tease about such an important thing as candy. And pick yourself out a new pair of gloves. That right one of yours there has a hole in the finger. You can't spend the winter with a hole in your glove, or you're liable to freeze that finger plumb off!”

When Canfield had given the boy a paper sack and a scoop, he walked down the center aisle and around behind the counter, looking at Cliff as though the rancher had grown an extra head. “What's happening here, Cliff? I told you I couldn't extend credit on the Winchester. Mighty expensive gun. You already owe nearly as much as what it's worth. I understand these have been tough years.”

The tall, dark, clean-shaven mercantiler glanced at another gun rack along the cluttered mercantile's east wall. “Why don't you pick out one of the older rifles. There's a Spencer repeater over there that Galvin Davis had—”

“I don't need credit, Cliff. In fact, I'd like to pay off what I owe you. Tally the rifle and the boy's gloves and candy and a box of .44 shells around the same snubbin' post as the rest of this stuff, and we'll take this green bronc to church.” He chuckled at the age-old expression. “That's one of my pa's own sayin's.”

Cliff set the new rifle on the zinc-covered Canfield's plank counter, between a jar of pickled eggs to the left and cigar rack on the right. He took a handful of cigars out of a box marked Old Havana
Imperiales
, and set them amongst the bundles of coffee, sugar, and flour that he'd set out earlier and which had originally brought him to the store.

Canfield knit his dark brows over his skeptical brown eyes as he glanced at the cigars. “Those are twenty-five cents apiece, Cliff. I only sell 'em because Ben Walker buys a handful every time he comes to town.”

Ben Walker was one of the richest ranchers east of the northern Front Range, and he had controlling interests in nearly half the businesses in Longmont. Walker walked tall and cast a long shadow in these parts.

“Add four
Imperiales
to the tally, George.”

“My gosh, Cliff, what'd you do—rob a bank?” Canfield chuckled and shook his head as he grabbed a pencil to begin figuring up the bill.

“No, I haven't stooped to that level yet. Another hard winter and I'm liable to, though.”

Cliff pulled a thick wad of folded greenbacks out of the pocket of his deerskin, wool-lined coat, which Sonja had sewn for him after they were first married and had recently moved out to this high, cold winter country from where they'd both grown up in Missouri. He saw Canfield eyeing the roll of bills. That made him flush with pride despite his natural inclination to self-effacement.

It was just that he'd never had a roll that size, and it made him, for the first time in his life, feel special and important and like he was worth something. He knew that money shouldn't make him feel that way, but he'd be damned if it didn't, just the same. His had been a hard life. That glint in Irvin's eyes as the boy limped down the center aisle toward the counter, the bulging paper sack in his hand, only made Cliff glow all the brighter.

“You got half a sack there, boy?”

Irvin held the bag up, his blue eyes round as saucers, a tentative smile on his lips, as though he wasn't quite sure his father wasn't funning with him, though he knew that Cliff would never have done something so cruel.

Irvin shook the sack and grinned delightedly. “Half a sack, Pa.”

“Put it up here and we'll have Mr. Canfield weigh it.”

Irvin dragged his stiff right leg along the aisle. The metal cage shone in the sunshine angling through the front and side windows. The sight of the contraption that was supposed to keep the knee from shifting and giving the boy's leg some strength, never failed to break Cliff's heart. The boy tossed the bag onto the counter beside the Winchester, and ran his glove with the hole in it down the frame, caressing the varnished forestock with the finger exposed by the hole.

“Wow—she's a beauty! Ain't it awful expensive, Pa?”

“Oh, it's not so bad.” Turning to Canfield, he said, glancing down at the cash in his hand, “Sold a few more cows than I figured this fall. That mining camp up the Big Thompson needed beef to get its miners through the winter.”

The lie took away some of Cliff's pride he felt at having this much money to spend on himself and his son, but he felt compelled to explain where it had come from, even if his explanation hadn't been the truth. Word of the thick greenback roll would likely spread, he realized with a rake of trepidation across the back of his neck. He hoped it wouldn't get back to Sonja. That was doubtful. Their ranch was pretty remote, and Sonja was so busy around the ranch that she didn't make it to town very often.

Besides, he'd soon tell her about the money. He'd have to. He was just biding his time, enjoying the extra load while he could.

Canfield scribbled a figure at the bottom of the notepad. “Well, if you're going to pay off your account, Cliff, the total comes to fifty-three dollars and twenty-five cents.”

“Wow!” Irvin said, shifting his gaze from the wad of green in his father's hand to the bag of candy, seeming certain that the candy was about to be put right back in the barrels it had come from.

Cliff counted out the cash, separated it from the rest, stuffed the rest back into his coat pocket, and then counted each of the other bills as he laid them onto Canfield's open ledger book. He snapped down the last bill, dug into his pocket, and propped a quarter down on top of the bills, giving it a celebratory spin.

“There you go, George! Free an' clear!”

“Yes, sir, free an' clear, Cliff,” Canfield said, shuttling his startled gaze from the cash to Cliff's smiling face. “Yes, sir, free an' clear. You fellas need any help out to your wagon?”

“Nah, we got it. Irvin, there's your new gloves, and there's your candy. You only get two, three pieces at the most on the ride home, so don't go sneakin' any extra!”

“I won't, Pa!” the boy said, glowing at the sack of candy that his father handed down to him, and dipping a hand through the top.

“And don't eat your quota before we even get back on the trail!”

“I won't, Pa!” the boy said around the chunk of cinnamon stick he'd just bitten off.

Cliff and Canfield laughed as Cliff hauled his gear off the counter, liking the feel of the Winchester in his hand, and crossed to the front of the store, the boy dragging his bad leg along behind him.

Cliff called, “Thanks, George. Probably won't see you till after Thanksgivin'!”

“Have a safe trip home, fellas. Hope you like that Winchester, Cliff. Tell your ma howdy for me—will you, Irvin!”

“You got it, Mr. Canfield!” the boy said, hobbling out the front door that his father held open for him and out onto the mercantile's broad loading dock.

Their orange-painted buckboard farm wagon sat in the street below the dock, a beefy paint horse whom Irvin had named Jabber in the traces. The horse shook its head in eager anticipation of getting back on the trail to their ranch as Cliff walked down the loading dock steps.

The rancher set the foodstuffs in the buckboard's box with the wheel he'd had repaired, along with a bolt of muslin for Sonja. He wrapped the rifle in a blanket and stowed it beneath the wagon's spring seat, with his hide-wrapped canteen and the old Spencer repeater he always carried in an ancient, cracked sheepskin scabbard that was worn clean through in places.

Cliff helped Irvin down the last few loading dock steps and lifted the boy up over the wagon's right front wheel into the seat padded with a heavy striped saddle blanket. Cliff inspected Jabber's driving bridle and harness, making sure all the straps were secure, and he climbed into the driver's seat beside the boy, and released the brake.

“Here we go, Jabber. Let's go home, ole son!”

The horse leaned into its hame, and the wagon rattled off down the broad main street of Longmont. At the west end of town, Cliff turned the horse onto the northern trail, pinching his hat brim to the jehu of the Golden–Camp Collins stage just entering town from the west, and put Jabber into a spanking trot.

It was a cool, clear day, the blue sky absolutely faultless. It had been a good morning for the two-hour ride to town, and it looked like the afternoon would be just as nice for the two-hour ride back to the Merriam Circle Slash M. Cliff settled back in his seat, both boots on the dashboard, and held the ribbons lightly in his gloved hands.

Irvin sat beside him, slowly chewing his candy and watching the prairie with its stirrup-high buffalo grass slide past. Out here on the prairie, with the Front Range jutting tall and dramatic and already limned with bright fields of fresh white snow jouncing around to their left, Cliff spotted several clumps of Ben Walker's copper-colored, glossy-coated cattle, driven down out of the mountains for the winter.

Cliff couldn't help eyeing the blooded stock with envy. Maybe someday he'd be able to afford such Durham bulls as the ones Ben Walker imported from Scotland to inject higher quality, shorthorn beef blood into Cliff's own stock that was still mostly of Texas longhorn origin and less able than the Durhams to weather the harsh winters of these high, northern climes.

A half hour after leaving Longmont, Cliff turned the wagon onto the left tine of the fork in the trail, avoiding the right tine that swung north and east toward Camp Collins, and headed west into the foothills. Here the trail grew steeper and more rugged, with pine-stippled buttes, red stone dikes, and cedar-studded mesas rising all around. The cone-shaped sierra of Longs Peak lofted like a statue from a massive stone base, straight ahead in the west. The crown jewel of the northern Front Range, Longs poked its stony, snow-mantled thumb straight up to tickle the underbelly of the arching, cobalt sky.