The Stranglers, page 14
part #4 of Page Murdock Series
"We had the devil's own time finding where they dropped the key," explained the kid.
I took another drink and said, "They're the ones that lynched your friend Chubb Bowles and your other deputy, Sheriff." It came out a croaked whisper.
"Figured as much." There was nothing in the peace officer's tone.
The kid said, "Flynn?"
I shook my head. He nodded. "Bury them?" he asked the sheriff.
"I reckon we got to, or be no better than them."
There were eight in the posse besides the sheriff and the kid, all deputized prospectors. Two of them produced shovels and they leaned into them with ease and in almost less time than it takes to tell about it they had a common grave dug six feet down and eight feet wide and dumped them in without ceremony. Someone fetched Byrd's corpse and the kid went into the woods carrying the lantern and hauled back Chink's body with his coat and shirt bunched up around his chest and his dead Mongol eyes contemplating the sky. He went in on top of the pile and soon it was covered with dirt and the kid got out his pocket Bible and read something short from the Old Testament. I was up now and testing my legs. Remarkable things, legs. Also arms and hands and fingers. You get to thinking such things when your life's been pulled away and then put back. I found the noose end of the rope lying where someone had flung it after I was cut down and I used my pocket knife to saw off a three-inch piece and stuck it in a pocket.
"Souvenir?" asked the kid, joining me.
"Reminder."
The sheriff told his men to collect the rifles and carbines and those horses that hadn't run off during the shooting. "What we get for them and the gear should take care of posse pay," he added to the kid and me. I didn't care. Cutting me down entitled them to everything in the High-woods.
We camped on some high ground west of the Sag, with a bottle of whiskey going around a big fire along with tinned sardines and squares of salt pork. I passed on the food and let the raw whiskey cauterize my throat. Already they were talking about bullets nicking twigs and things just over their heads. Years later they would haul out tired old coats and hats growing mildew and poke their fingers through moth holes by way of showing how close they came to the edge that night, and they wouldn't be lying, because by then they'd believe every word. Someone lent me a blanket and we slept until first light and then drank hot coffee and mounted up for the trip back to Great Falls. I rode the chestnut mare I had so much not wanted to leave before. In town the kid and I picked up some stores and shook hands with the sheriff and were out of there by early afternoon. We overnighted at Painted Rock, where the kid's father heard our story at the supper table with his moustache grim and said nothing except to demand coffee from his young wife. My throat had opened up by then and I was eating.
In the morning the kid came out to the barn where I was saddling the chestnut and said, "I won't be going on to Helena with you. I'll send someone in a day or so to pay me up at the hotel and collect my things and what you think you owe me."
"Oh?" I leaned the cinch tight.
"Pa needs me here. Every time I go away and come back he looks older. He's got rheumatism and his eyes are going, though he won't own up to it. The ranch will fly all to hell if I don't start looking after things."
"That's dust." I scabbarded my Winchester. Shiloh had taken good care of it. I didn't know what had become of Flynn's Spencer. The sheriff had taken my Deane-Adams off Schichter's body and returned it, too.
"Yeah," the kid admitted. "It's dust. Maybe I ain't cut out for ranching, but I was a damn fool to try marshaling a second time."
I looked at him across the saddle. He went on.
"That gutshot one went sliding in through them trees and didn't make a noise, just like a wounded cougar. I went in after him in the dark. I stopped with black trees and bushes all around and it was just as quiet—well, the peepers had stopped and after all that shooting it was like it is just after a bell stops ringing. I was holding my Colt. I heard a rustling and I swung that way and snapped off a shot and a buck deer blatted and thumped the ground going away, crashing through the bushes. I reckon that's why I was a little slower turning the next time I heard something.
"He come straight at me then, all movement in the dark with his breath whistling and I had the Colt pointed right at him and I didn't even remember I had it, I couldn't move. He ran into me and I went over backwards. He grabbed my gun by the barrel and I was falling down away from him and he was pulling the gun back toward him and it went off and he kind of shuddered then, and by that time I had one foot behind the other and I pulled the hammer back with both thumbs and shot him again and then his fingers just kind of slid off my hands on the gun. He grunted when he hit the ground, just like a grizzly blowing its lungs when you stop its charge."
I was still looking at him, but I couldn't read his expression in the barn doorway with the sun at his back.
"It got even quieter then," he said. "There wasn't any wind at all and I was choking on spent powder. I tried to get a light going. I went through almost every match I had before I got one struck, and there he was on the ground in front of me, laying on his stomach with his head turned on one side. I squatted with the Colt in one hand and the match in the other and looked at his face. His mouth was clamped tight with blood in one corner and his eyes was going soft. They kept getting softer the longer I looked at them. Just like any dead animal's."
"The first five are the hardest," I said, and was conscious of having said it before when I was a lot younger.
"I reckon I'll take your word on that."
I led the horse out into the sunshine and mounted. The kid had come with me and I leaned down to grasp his hand.
"You were a help twice," I said. "You know where I am if you ever need some back."
He smiled with the sun on his face. "Don't wait for it. I mean to live quiet and die of boredom."
"For whatever price you put on it I think you decided right."
"You feel that way, what keeps you doing it?"
"I'm pretty good at it," I said. "When I'm not blundering into ambushes and getting my neck stretched and my friends killed."
"I reckon you liked Flynn."
"He was a damn fool and came as close to killing us all as you can come and still not do it. Yes, I liked him." I held up a hand and he held one up and I snicked the mare forward with the sun at my back.
I welcomed the warmth of it on my way around the Big Belts. The air was sweet now with spring to stay and one of those chinooks that brush your face like a woman's fingers was coming in over the Rockies all the way from Nevada. My neck and throat were better but I still had the headache. It felt as it might have had those popping noises I'd heard while I was hanging really been the sound of my blood vessels bursting and not gunfire from the Great Falls posse. Also my wrists were sore from all those hours wearing manacles.
The light was almost gone when I crossed the Missouri and swung left, bypassing Helena entirely for Judge Blackthorne's house a mile outside of town. When you've left a place in unfamiliar hands it's only common sense to find out what those hands have been up to before you go back. A lamp was burning downstairs when I groundhitched the mare and stepped up on the porch.
"Murdock!"
I turned around slowly, quietly drawing the Deane-Adams as I did so, with my body between it and the man who had hailed me. The lawn in front of the house was dark and the man standing there was wearing a tan Texas hat whose wide brim threw his face in shadow from the light coming through the window from inside, but I recognized his black clothes and the Colt in his hand and most of all his whispery wheeze of a voice. His new deputy's star gleamed sullenly on his breast.
TWENTY
Hello, Willard," I said. ''Where's the Colonel?" "Don't know. Don't care. These days I answer to Marshal Mercy."
"What's your business here?"
"Protecting the judge."
"From what?"
"Visitors. Marshal's orders."
The gun was a rock in his hand. I held the Deane-Adams close to my hip out of sight. "That include me?"
"You especially," he said. "I'm arresting you."
"What's the charge?"
"That's up to the marshal. Come down off of there slow."
"It's dark. You'll have to show me the way."
Silence stretched thin and tight between us. Then the light found something on his face ... A smile?
"Your choice." He twirled and holstered the six-gun and set his feet with his arms bent and I shot him twice in the thickest part of his body.
The first bullet staggered him. The second knocked him sitting, as .45s will no matter where you hit them. He sat on the grass with his fingers laced on his chest and the blood dark between them and his hat was off now and the light on his face was yellow. "That wasn't fair," he gasped.
"Who said anything about fair?"
The front door opened while I was watching him die. I spun, thumbing back the hammer. Judge Blackthorne was standing just inside in his shirtsleeves, collarless, with the light behind him.
"I thought that was your English gun," he said. "It has a nasty sound. Is he dead?"
I started to say not yet, but by the time I turned back and looked at Frank Willard again the answer had changed. He had flopped over onto his right shoulder with his hands still on his chest and his gun still in its holster. Blackthorne stepped out on the porch, drawing the door shut behind him. "Was that necessary?"
"It would have been later if not now," I said. "He was too fast."
The Judge looked grim. "He and Jericho Mercy have been holding us here for three days, spelling each other. They took my Remington first thing."
"How's Mrs. Blackthorne?"
"She's upstairs. She took a sleeping potion. What happened with the Indian?"
That was the Judge for you, business first no matter what. I told him the whole thing there on that ghostlit porch with a dead man lying just off the edge. Blackthorne scowled in his neat beard.
"Why is it Sugar Jim Creel is the only man you've brought in alive in months?"
"My neck feels all right now," I said. "Thanks for asking."
He ignored that. "Creel hangs next month for the surveyor's murder. The jury came in divided on the murders of Miller and Rudabaugh."
"I don't guess that matters with the Indian and Byrd dead."
"Not to you."
I ignored that. "What's Mercy up to?"
"What you said. He's stuck a straw into everything in Helena that tastes like money and levied a two-percent tax on all the gold that comes through the assay office. He started by sending every available deputy but his brothers and Willard west on some trumped-up posse and then he placed Bill Gordon and me under house arrest, calling it protection. If you hadn't come here first he or Joshua or Jericho or all three would probably have cut you down as soon as your first shoe hit the street."
"Didn't anybody stand up to them?"
"Just two, Chicago Joe and the owner of the Belmont. Mercy padlocked the Belmont for improper disposal of slops, but now it's open again and you figure it out. One of Joe's girls got knocked around by a customer, though she won't say who it was, and now Joe is paying too."
"Which girl?"
"A young blonde. I think they call her Jackie. She's pretty badly broken up." He peered at my face. "What's wrong?"
"It's the light here," I said. "Does Mercy still hang out at the Belmont?"
"Yes, but—"
"Mr. Murdock."
The harsh whisper came from beyond the light shed through the window. I had put away my gun and now I drew it again and moved so that I wasn't outlined against the lighted square of glass. "Who's talking?"
A pause, and then something small glittered out of the darkness and tinkled onto the boards at my feet. I nudged it with a toe. It was my deputy's star, the one I had given to Duncan, the Negro who ran the livery.
"Come ahead," I said. "If you're alone."
"I been alone since I was borned." He stepped into the light, a thick hard man with dull gray hair in tight coils, wearing the same filthy shirt and jeans I had seen him in last. When I saw he was alone I put up the revolver and squatted and picked up the star and stood and put it in my breast pocket.
"I been watching the place the last two nights," Duncan said. "I figured if you came at all you'd come here and after dark." He kicked Frank Willard's body at his feet. "You don't look so much now, Mr. Scourge of the Border."
"It costs nothing to respect the dead," said the Judge sternly.
"Yes, sir."
"What is it?" I asked the Negro.
"The Mercys is waiting for you in town. They been expecting you the last couple of nights like me. Jericho, he's by your room. Joshua's at the livery and Jordan's in the Belmont like always." He showed the spaces between his teeth. "Attila's got Rome and you're outside the wall."
"I knew that, or suspected it. What else?"
"I'm thinking you're wanting to get in there without making a lot of noise about it. I'm thinking I can help."
"I'm listening."
"Don't be an idiot," said the Judge. "Before they trapped me here I wired Cheyenne for marshals. Let them handle it."
I said, "If Mercy's got things nailed down as tight as you say he knows all about that wire. Those marshals will be the best part of a month getting their orders straight and outfitting and riding here. By that time he and his brothers will have made their strike and gone. Talk," I told Duncan.
"Best way to cover noise is make a louder one," he said. "I got me a fair noisemaker right here."
He reached behind his back and pulled something out from under his belt and brought it around in front. It was a pre-Civil War pepperbox pistol, .36 caliber, brass and steel with a walnut grip, six-barreled and big as a general store.
He said, "I gots to be careful with it, on account of the flash sets off the other five caps sometimes and she sprays lead like a Gatling."
"What do you gain by this?" I asked him.
"I'm fifty-two and black, Mr. Murdock. I don't stand to lose a whole hell of a lot, if you'll excuse my bad language, Judge, your honor."
That didn't answer my question, but I told him to give me the rest of it. He shrugged.
"I'm thinking if somebody was to ride through town apopping away with Old Sally here, somebody else could slip in while everybody was looking the wrong way."
"No good. The Mercys are smarter than they are honest. They won't leave their posts just for that."
While I was talking, Duncan stepped over Willard's body and mounted the porch. "They might if they thought it was you doing the riding and popping," he said, and transferred my hat from my head to his. He grinned his checkered grin.
Blackthorne said, "You're idiots, the two of you," and went inside, closing the door gently to avoid waking his wife.
Duncan had walked from town. We led the mare in silence the mile to the town limits, where I slipped out of my canvas jacket and he put it on to go with my hat and I handed him the reins. "Can you count to a thousand?" I asked.
"When I got to. Generally I don't see a thousand of much of anything."
"Count to that and then ride like hell. Don't start firing that widow-maker until you're at least halfway to the end of the street. Then get rid of it because the iron will just slow you down, and squeeze everything you can out of the chestnut. Find some place to overnight and don't come back before morning."
I stopped talking. We were standing at the mouth of the broad main street with light scalloping the edges from the windows of brick buildings on both sides. Piano music trickled out of the saloons, but at the moment the street was deserted. With all the regular deputies out of town there were no figures in the shadows with shotguns. I clasped Duncan's hand, crusty with calluses.
"Stay alive," I said.
"You too."
I left him to wind my way down alleys reeking of slops and behind frame buildings with the paint eaten down to the wood where stray dogs had lifted their legs against them. Everything looks different at night and I made a wrong turn that sent me a block off course, but I doubled back and came out behind the livery. An orange glow the size of a nickel marked where Joshua Mercy was smoking a cigar at the other end of the alley. While I was looking, the glow made an upward arc and brightened, reflecting off the highlights of his broad fleshy face with its thick dark moustache curling at the ends. Threads of smoke uncoiled under a coal-oil streetlamp on the corner.
Keeping to the shadows I moved along the back wall of the gunsmith's shop that faced the street perpendicular to the one the livery was on, leaning on the balls of my feet and feeling in front of me with each foot to make sure there were no obstacles in my path. It took me well past the count of a thousand to get around the long building, but Duncan must have been a slow counter, because just as I reached the corner around from Joshua, close enough to smell his cigar, hoofs thudded in the direction of Main Street and then a harsh flat snapping shattered the relative silence, the noise of a .36 pistol being fired in the open air.
"What the hell!" I heard Joshua say, and then he came past the corner with his profile against the light from the streetlamp and one hand reaching back for the Smith & Wesson in his holster. I had the Deane-Adams by the barrel in my right hand and I brought the butt down square into the center of his black hat as hard as I had ever hit anything. He whimpered a little and dropped like a sack full of anvils.
TWENTY-ONE
I reached down to jerk his gun out of leather, but he had fallen on top of it and I couldn't find the butt under his two hundred and forty-plus pounds. Doors were slamming and dogs were barking and people were shouting. It was Teamstrike all over again. A six-gun coughed deeply Main Street way. I heard footsteps approaching on the run and turned and grasped the handle of one of the big front doors to the stable and pulled it and it was unlocked and I ducked through the opening and let the door close behind me, muffling the noises outside.
