The Lawbringers 3, page 1
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BROTHER SHERIFF – BROTHER OUTLAW
Three disasters hit the mountain town of Aztec at the same time:
A blizzard had completely blocked the passes and cut the town off from all help.
Curt Warren, the prospector the town had been grubstaking, was found bushwhacked while returning with big news.
And a notorious outlaw and killer had been trapped in town by the big snow.
It all added up to the biggest crisis of his career to Sheriff Morgan, especially since the outlaw – and suspected bushwhacker – was Morgan’s own no-good brother!
THE LAWBRINGERS 3: THE BIG SNOW
By Brian Garfield
First Published by Avalon Books in 1962
Copyright © 1962, 2020 by Brian Garfield
First Digital Edition: January 2020
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Mike Stotter
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.
Chapter One
Echoes slammed back and forth against the high limestone cliffs – echoes of a rifle shot, harsh and undulating, and John Morgan reined in his horse. He scowled and his sun-squinted eyes swept the rocky rims above. That shot had not been aimed at him – he knew that much for it had been too far away. But it had been aimed at something or at someone.
No unnatural silhouette was in sight up there. Morgan’s lean face did not lose its wary frown. He lifted his rifle from the saddle boot and held it across the pommel while he turned his horse up-canyon, toward the sound of the shot. Powder snow rose in soft flurries at his horse’s heels. He slipped the glove off his right hand and put it in the pocket of his bearskin coat. He swung by habit with loose comfort in the rocking saddle, and his eyes lay constantly on the ragged edges of the serrated cliff tops at either side. Somewhere around here, not far away, a man had fired a rifle. The man might have been hunting game, he might have been firing a shot for the hell of it, he might have let his rifle go off by accident. In any of those cases, Morgan’s concern would not have been to investigate. But there was the possibility that a man had been shot by that single bullet. And if that was the case it became Morgan’s business. For Morgan wore a star.
There was another possibility, for this was rugged, treacherous country, filled with deep pockets and drifts of January snow. A man could easily get into trouble in this angry wilderness. Such a man might fire a shot to summon help. And so it was that Morgan’s half-lidded gray eyes lay their full, trained attention on the horizons, the rock and snow stretches and the patches of thin, naked timber covering yonder mountainsides. This was wild country, these Arizona mountains, and even a skilled mountain man might run into grief up here. At mid-afternoon the temperature, he was sure, lay well below freezing. His ears, nose and single uncovered hand felt the thin bite of the weather, even though the sky was clear and not a cloud showed.
He reached the head of the box canyon and since he could go no farther, he sat still, puzzled. Morgan was unaccustomed to missing anything. He knew his inspection had been careful, and he knew that the shot he’d heard had come from somewhere along the stretch of canyon he had just passed. He was troubled to know there was something back there that his intense search had failed to find. But there was only one course left – he must swing around and descend the canyon again. He had to make another try.
Halfway through the canyon he found the sign he sought – not much of a sign. An experienced rider’s eye learned to distinguish between sun glinting off a snow patch and sun glinting off a rifle barrel, and Morgan could tell the difference between the shine of bridle metal and the shine of a brass buckle or buttons.
And that was metal, brass metal, winking at him through a hole in the trees, so he turned his horse that way, upslope toward the base of the limestone cliff. Presently he lost sight of the reflected spot of light but had its location fixed firmly in his mind, so that he threaded the tall pines without hesitation until he came upon a small clearing where a saddled roan gelding stood riderless, its reins dragging, and a man in a thick buffalo coat lay face down in the snow, his outflung arm extended toward a cold revolver.
Morgan swept the roundabout timber with one quick survey and dismounted to kneel by the prone’ man. He looked into that mans twisted face. He grunted. “Curt Warren. Dead as the rocks.”
A bullet had ranged down through the back of Warren’s neck and Morgan was surprised that the man had found enough strength to draw his revolver after such a wound. Since he was the sheriff of Coyotero County, Morgan took time to dig in with his knife and retrieve the spent bullet from Warren’s chest – a grisly business that he had no heart for, but it had to be done.
With the battered lead slug lying in his palm, cleaned as best as he could with snow, he crouched back on his heels with his wide-brimmed hat tilted back and frowned speculatively at the object in his hand. “Forty-four forty,” he said aloud, and muttered a curse. “Only every other man in these hills packs a .44 rifle. That’s my first break shot to hell. Now then, it hasn’t been more than twenty minutes since I heard that shot. Maybe my man’s still on this side of the mountain. Let’s have a look.” He left Warren’s body and Warren’s horse where they were for the moment, planning to come back to them when he could. Then he stepped aboard his own saddle and swung upslope through the trees, seeking a higher point of ground from which he might command the district.
Atop a bald knoll he halted the horse and sat with one fist set against his hip and the other raised to his chin, frowning darkly over the vast stretch of country visible in three directions. Not an object moved. “A man commits a murder within a mile of me and gets away with it,” Morgan said. “I don’t believe it. He’s around here – around here somewhere. Let’s find his tracks.”
A vague expression crossed his face; his long jaw crept forward and he put the horse back down into the timber, making his guess as to where the ambush bullet had been fired from. The bullet had sloped down into Warren’s body; therefore the killer had to be at some higher level. There was only one point of land in the immediate area from which such a shot could be fired, and Morgan went across the humps and dips of cross-canyons and little ridges to reach it. Once there, he bent low in the saddle and searched the surrounding rocks and ground. A white chip had been scraped out of a flat boulder at the rim of the rise; careful inspection led him to believe the killer had lain on this rock to fire his shot. The ground was too rocky to admit hoofprints, but here and there he found rocks that had been turned over or scratched by iron horseshoes, and this evidence provided the trail he now began to follow.
It took him up along the pine-covered hillsides to the base of the limestone cliffs and here, in drifts of snow and soft patches of earth, he found horse tracks. He dismounted to examine the individual hoofprints, but there seemed to be no telltale irregularities in the prints of any of the fugitive horse’s shoes. Another possible break was thus gone; there was no way of identifying the killer’s horse. The intermittent signs led him along the base of the high rock wall until it arrived at a wide fissure opening back, which, when he turned into it, proved to be a side canyon whose floor rose steeply and irregularly to a back part of the rim. “He’s gone over the mountain, then,” Morgan said, and put his horse up the narrow draw at a trot.
It was a steep climb and the horse was breathing heavily at the top of it. The trail turned through a scrubby growth of piñon bushes and when he came out of that narrow district, he could look forward along the great sweep of the slope and see the hoof trail moving plainly down on the broken snow. At that point Morgan reined his horse in and swore a muffled oath. The tracks, plain in the snow, went down the gentle mountainside in a straight line as far as the edge of the valley foothills, where they joined the main valley road. Following this trail farther would be patently useless. As soon as the killer’s tracks mingled with the heavy traffic of the valley road, he would be lost. There was only one small consolation. The road ran in two directions. Southward, it passed Horsehead ranch and the gate of Bell ranch, then climbed into the reaches of the Arrowheads where it crossed Peacock Pass at an elevation of nine thousand feet, and descended into the valley of the Massacre River. That pass had been closed with snow for two weeks; no rider could get through.
Northward, the road looped alongside the flow of the Yankee River until it passed the Rocking M, whereupon it turned east to run into the town of Aztec, which was Morgan’s headquarters. Beyond Aztec was the broken district of the lava badlands. This lush, long valley was commanded on three sides by the pressing slopes of high mountain ranges, and on the fourth side by those badlands. The only trails out of the valley were the southern route over Peacock Pass, now impassable, and a single narrow wagon trail that went west from Aztec across Ten Mile Gap through the Ocotillos. That trail had been closed by snow since the night before last. The valley was completely cut off from the world beyond except for the telegraph key at Landering’s general store in Aztec, and until some of the snow melted in the passes, the valley would have to exist on what supplies it had. This isolation, however, would also keep Curt Warren’s killer penned in. Somewhere in the valley, on one of a half-dozen ranches or in town, that man would have to wait out the weather. It gave Morgan a chance, if only he could find a clue to that man’s identity.
After giving his horse a brief rest, he turned back into the narrow defile down through the rim, and came presently upon Warren’s body. The dead man’s horse had drifted off a few yards to root grass from under the snow and Morgan had a few bad moments getting the half-frozen body on the back of the skittish horse. The horse wanted no part of death riding on its back. But after a brief struggle, Morgan had the stocky prospector’s body lashed across the saddle and he mounted his own horse to lead the other out of the canyon. Only then did he realize that he had not yet replaced the glove on his right hand; he did so now, with a scowl.
Somewhere in the valley of the Yankee, a killer sat waiting for the passes to clear. Morgan had no idea how long that would be; he had known the valley to remain snowbound for a month at a time, but he also had known the passes to melt off within three days after a snowfall at this time of year. For that much, he would have to rely on blind luck. Beyond that, he had to start thinking, alertly and shrewdly.
He had no witness and no visible clue to the killer’s identity, beyond the possession of a lead slug that had been fired from a rifle – a bullet that might belong to anyone. The Winchester .44 was by far the most popular rifle in this part of the country. Trying to use that slug as a means of attack would be like looking for one particular bee in a hive. So he had to begin elsewhere.
Warren had been a strange man, friendly enough and without mortal enemies, as far as Morgan knew. Warren’s occupation had been prospecting and his income had come from the time-honored, traditional grubstakes. He had spent six or seven years in the mountains around Aztec, hunting for a vein of gold that he swore was somewhere near the headwaters of the Yankee, high up in the Ocotillos along one fork, or in the Arrowheads along the other fork.
There were a few men who lived in shacks along the river flats in the valley who had made livings for several years by panning gold out of the Yankee. None of them had become rich; there didn’t seem to be enough gold in the river gravel to make a mining rush worthwhile, and most of the streams in the Southwest held enough dust to keep a man alive – if he didn’t mind living on bare subsistence. But Warren had become convinced that the gold drifting down the floor of the Yankee had a single source somewhere higher up in a rich lode, and the man had spent these last years searching for that lode. His presence, when he appeared as he infrequently did, had been taken for granted; his absences had never been noticed. He kept to himself but he was neither close-mouthed nor surly; he led a lonely life but he seemed comfortable and friendly enough in the company of people.
There had been nothing mysterious about Curt Warren other than his background; but then, if a man thought about it, it would be hard to mention more than a half-dozen men in the entire valley whose origins and pasts were widely known.
Morgan’s own past was clouded, beginning in the swamps of East Texas, where he was born just before the War Between the States. He grew up along the buffalo trails that his father and brother traveled in their business of skinning buffalo for hides, having his schooling come to him intermittently along the trail and his first fights in corrals and buffalo-skinner camps. He rode the grubline from Texas to Montana, joining a posse with his brother in which they both made sudden reputations as men bold with guns, taking a job here as deputy marshal and there as shotgun guard, while tales of his brother came back to him sporadically – tales of a brother gone bad, riding with the Wild Bunch in Wyoming and the McLowerys in Tombstone.
Morgan had come to Arizona six years ago in search of his brother but he had not found him. Instead, he had found a town in need of law, a town that knew his name – John Morgan of Ellsworth, they called him – a town that gave him a job as the sheriff of the county of which it was seat.
He performed his duties quietly, without bluster and without attracting attention. Aztec never had been a really wild town in need of taming, and Morgan found his job to be hard and tedious work but seldom dangerous. He came to know the people and he came to like them, so he had stayed on, and the months lapsed over into years and no more word of his brother reached him. He began to assume his brother was dead or had gone far away, and Morgan began to forget him.
His head rose with a start. His pony was turning into the Aztec road, and he realized that the thoughts he had been thinking were not the kind of thoughts a man should be concentrating on when a killer was loose. He turned his attention back to Curt Warren, and to Curt Warren’s killer.
There seemed to be no good way to turn. There was no witness; there was no evidence to speak of; there was no apparent motive, and no man’s name rose before him as a suggestion of a place to start. This was a blind trail. Morgan’s mouth extended into a long, straight fine. There had been a few unsolved crimes here back along the years – that he could admit; but none of them had been murder. He did not propose to let this one go unsolved, yet he saw no way to prevent that from happening.
He was crossing the last of the foothills, descending toward the valley floor on the road, when a new thought came to him. He halted the two horses and got down to walk back beside Warren’s horse. The slim possibility existed that Warren might have found the vein of gold he had been seeking all this time. That would give a man reason to kill him – if a man existed who knew of Warren’s discovery, and if the discovery actually had taken place.
A thin chance at best but it was something to work on. Morgan untied Warren’s body, laid it in the road, then methodically went through the dead man’s pockets.
What he found there left him as uncertain as he had been before.
In one coat pocket he discovered a thick sheaf of papers, all of which turned out to be maps. They were topographical pictures of the Ocotillo and Arrowhead mountain ranges, divided into small squares. A great many areas on the maps were crossed off in pencil. Morgan assumed these were areas that Warren had prospected and found worthless, but they gave him no more information than that. Several segments were left unmarked on a number of the maps – there were fourteen maps in all – but he found no obvious indications, such as large circles or X marks or directions written anywhere on them. The maps proved nothing, and they disproved nothing. Exasperated, he folded the maps and shoved them into his own pocket, and continued his search.
A small canvas bag – a poke – lay in another pocket and seemed empty, but when he felt inside he could feel mineral grains, so he turned the bag inside out and brushed a few flakes of gold dust into his open hand. But this again proved nothing. There was not more than a dollar’s worth of gold sticking to the lining of the poke. Whether there had ever been more than that^ or whether it had come from the panning flats along the river or from the mountains, were questions the evidence could not answer.
He found a flat leather wallet in Warren’s hip pocket and he squatted back on his heels to look through it. Inside were a few one-dollar bills, a gold certificate for five dollars, the bill of sale for a horse, saddle, blanket and bridle, another bill of sale for food and miscellaneous supplies made out by Landerings Mercantile Store, a few copper pennies and several handwritten notes folded together. Morgan opened one of them and read:
November 19th, 1883
This is a copy, of which I, Curtis L. Warren, have given the original of this note to Philip Landering, and I agree hereby that it represents my debt to him of seventeen dollars and eighty-five cents. This I.O.U. is hereby signed by
Curtis L. Warren.
The other notes – there were more than a dozen of them – were all worded exactly the same. Three or four were made out to Landering, who apparently had grubstaked the prospector at fairly regular intervals. Others were made out to Jim Davenport of the Bell ranch, Lee Clark of Clark’s Hardware Emporium, Hugh Justice of the Horsehead ranch, Judge Lucas Schollenberg, and Lincoln Short of the Gold Star Saloon. One more note was made out to Sheriff John Morgan, Coyotero County. Morgan allowed himself a brief smile and tore it up.
