Death Rattle

by Jory Sherman

  Brad shook his head.

  “I won’t need it, Harry,” he said. “I’ve got this.”

  Brad pulled out the thong around his neck and lifted a set of rattles out of his shirt. He shook the thong, and it rattled. Pendergast leaned back in his saddle. Quince’s horse whinnied and sidestepped away from the sound.

  Harry pulled the badge back, but did not put it in his pocket.

  “Maybe you don’t need this, after all,” he said.

  Brad shook the rattle again.

  “This is the only badge I need,” he said, and let it fall back under his shirt.

  “So that’s why they call you Sidewinder,” Quince said, his voice a breathy whisper. “I wondered.”

  “And he’s just as deadly,” Pendergast said.

  “I’m going to follow the tracks of those killers, Harry. Maybe I’ll learn something about this gang.”

  “There’s a room ready for you at the Clarendon, Brad.” Brad rode past the rocks and waved to Harry and Quince. In moments, he was following the hoofprints well off the road.

  There were six men, he determined, not five. And the tracks were heading into rough country, deep in the foothills.

  The sky was a pastel blue and the clouds were thickening off to the west as if the mountains were giving birth to white thunderheads that would float down over the plain and darken the land with shadows.

  A lone quail piped a warning somewhere ahead of him, and the silence grew up around him as he followed the tracks of six horses and six men who wore yellow hoods.

  THREE

  Brad studied the tracks and felt the hackles rise and bristle on the back of his neck. He surveyed the country ahead and around him with an uneasy feeling, a feeling that he was riding into someone else’s territory, a forbidden realm where a stranger’s life was on the line.

  What had he gotten himself into with Pendergast? He had helped the man break up a gang of cattle rustlers, then accepted the dubious job of detective in Pendergast’s agency. Harry had assured him that he would be called to duty only when absolutely necessary but would receive a monthly retainer just to be on call. And Brad had needed the money, both to restock his decimated herd of cattle and to build his ranch some miles into the mountains above Leadville.

  And now this.

  This tug of Fate once again. A tug that was pulling him away from Felicity and his ranch, away from the peace and tranquillity of his own land in the mountains, into the nightmarish crush of civilization with its men of greed and lust, its corruption of the flesh, its disease-bearing malignancy of a man’s soul.

  He patted his hand on the bedroll tied behind his saddle, the full saddlebags. Felicity had done that, with Julio Aragon’s help, of course. She made sure he had bedding and food when he had told her he was just riding down into town with Quince to see Pendergast. He had told her, “I’ll be back home by sundown.”

  “Just in case,” she had said. Then she had embraced him, kissed him long and lingeringly before he mounted Ginger and rode off shortly after dawn, a dawn that cracked the eyes with its blaze of peach and salmon colors, its scent of sage and fir and pine, its gray mist rising off the land, off the dew-flocked backs of his cattle, and Julio waving good-bye with a wide grin cracking his sun-bronzed face.

  Both of them had packed his supplies, he thought, as if they knew he would not be back home this day, and maybe not the next.

  What in hell was he doing? he asked himself as he followed the single line of tracks, knowing that the outlaws were following the same path back to the place from whence they had come. Two sets of horse tracks, going and coming. Plain to read, and chilling to behold. Six men, all armed, all wearing yellow hoods because they did not want to be identified. Cowardly men, hiding their faces under masks.

  He didn’t know this part of the country. He was south of Leadville, he knew, and he could almost smell the prairie that lay beyond the rugged foothills and the mountains. The land was broken with ravines, gullies, and low ridges that hid what lay past them. He could not see more than an eighth of a mile beyond the line of horse tracks. A dangerous place to be, yet his hunch was that the tracks would lead to Leadville, or someplace near there. From the looks of the tracks, those men he pursued were long gone. Already, the edges of the tracks were crumbling, turning to dust.

  This was a game trail, he decided, not heavily traveled, although he saw signs of deer, rabbit, and quail droppings. Nothing fresh. The trail wound through brush and down a shallow ravine, then topped a small ridge before leading down the other side to a stretch of flat land. He kept looking around him, above and below the trail to see if anyone might be watching. He had the feeling that he was alone and that nobody was expecting him to follow this path to wherever it led.

  He kept expecting the tracks to lead back up to the stage road, but they didn’t. Instead, they followed a southeasterly course into even more desolate and deserted country. Finally, the game trail petered out, and the tracks became harder to follow. The land grew more rugged, with low mounds dotted with prickly pear and sage, spiky Spanish bayonets, and cholla. The tracks were no longer in a straight line, but were separated, as if the outlaws had ridden in formation, six men on horseback, four or five feet apart, as if they were nearing their destination.

  The tracks led Brad to a rocky hardpan on a wide plain. To his surprise, the riders had fallen into single file once again, and, as he soon learned, they were riding in a straight line along the same path they had taken. The trail was a moil of tracks going in both directions, yet he was certain none of the riders had taken such a path before the day they rode off to kill Hugh Pendergast.

  “Pretty smart,” he muttered to himself. At least one of the men was likely a tracker himself. And, Brad surmised, at least one of them must have scouted the terrain before any of them set out to stop the stage from Leadville. Yet, as he surveyed the terrain, he could not see any other tracks on either side of the narrow trail. There was no broken ground, no overturned rocks, no damaged brush.

  The days-old tracks were fading fast on the hardpan, the edges wafted into dust by the winds, the strong breezes that blew across the small plateau. At least one man had known that that was likely to happen and had led the others across this stretch. The plateau began to narrow and grow smaller. Brad strained his eyes to make out the maze of tracks. By the time he got to the end, they were all but invisible, the ground scoured by strong breezes and violent winds. As soon as he reached the edge, a strong gust of wind struck him in the face and he felt grains of sand sting his cheeks. He bowed his head and pulled the brim of his hat lower over his face.

  The wind blew from a deep ravine off to his right, so narrow it was like a roofless funnel. The hardpan vanished and he rode through thick brush and heavy sand, downward into a grassy stretch that was almost like prairie. Clumps of prickly pear and stalks of yucca fought for dominion among small stunted pines that had taken hold along a narrow stretch of land where the winds from the plains met the zephyrs streaming down from the mountains. He felt the stings of dust flung from the west, and he narrowed his eyes as he struggled to make out the faint spoor of six horses in single file.

  Finally, the tracks faded in the maze of cactus, sage, and stunted pines, the spikes of Spanish bayonets and clumps of gama grass.

  Brad felt as if he had descended into a desolate hell where even the wildlife feared to tread. And, as he gazed ahead of him, he saw only more jumbled land that looked as though something with giant claws had once roamed through this empty lowland and torn up the ground with its gigantic talons. Here, there were no landmarks, no definition of terrain that his senses might grasp and understand.

  Here, there was only desolation and trackless earth where the winds swirled and danced like dervishes. He saw a small dust devil form several yards away, and Ginger shied at the swirl of dust that seemed to grow in size as it moved across their path and headed for the distant, unseen plain.

  He turned Ginger toward higher ground, tapping his flan
ks with his spurs. He could no longer see the snowcapped peaks to the west and felt as if he were in some kind of huge bowl that could swallow all who passed through its center. Ginger climbed up a steep incline toward a ridge that promised to give Brad a better view of the land ahead.

  When he reached the ridgeline, both he and Ginger were winded, and he reined the horse to a stop.

  There was no sign of life as far as he could see, and a stiff wind made his shirt flap and rattled the brim of his hat.

  Then he saw it, far off, just barely above the horizon. He almost missed it, but there it was, floating just above the farthest point of land to the south, a faint scrim of black smoke, a serpentine scrawl that swirled and snaked into the sky, then vanished like some desert mirage.

  He looked off to the bulging clouds boiling over the foothills, blotting out the mountains. They darkened as he watched, and he saw the tracings of summer lightning flicker in their depths, soundless and far away, but brilliant as polished silver.

  He shivered as his spine tingled with a sudden gust of chilled wind.

  FOUR

  Earl Fincher stood outside the building, a ladle full of water held to his lips. He watched the two riders approaching from the west, then dropped the ladle back in the well bucket. He stepped to one side, cupped the beard stubble that flocked his chin, then turned to call out to one of his men who stood in the doorway.

  “I only see two riders, Abe.”

  Abe Danner stepped from the doorway to the hard ground. He peered at the two riders.

  “Yep, Finch, ain’t but Lenny and Giles a-comin’.”

  “Where in hell is Cole?”

  Abe walked over to the well to stand beside Fincher, who was a head taller and several pounds thinner than the squat form of the pudgy-bellied Danner.

  “Hell, I don’t know, Finch. Maybe Cole got drunk at the Clarendon and they left him there.”

  “If he did, it’ll be his last drink,” Fincher said, a mirthless smile on his hatchet-thin face. “He knows the rules.”

  “Yeah, he does. I was just makin’ a joke, Finch. Cole’s a good man. A little loco, maybe, but a good man.”

  “We’ll see what Lenny has to say.”

  Fincher fished a cheroot from his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it as he and Danner waited for the two riders.

  When Lenny Carmichael and Giles Becker rode up, they both took off their hats and wiped sweat from their foreheads. Carmichael looked at the smokestack spewing black fumes into the sky from one of the buildings in the old abandoned smelter that served as headquarters for Fincher and his men. There were played-out mines surrounding the smelter, some with considerable tailings, and there was a slag heap several yards away from the building where the smoke was rising from a stone chimney. Both men were wearing sheepskin-lined jackets. Both were covered with a thin patina of dun-colored dust.

  “Storm’s a-comin’, Finch,” Carmichael said. “It’s colder’n a bitch up in Leadville.”

  “Where in hell is Cole?”

  “A lot I got to tell you, boss,” Carmichael said.

  “It had better be good, Lenny.”

  “Soon as we put up the horses and you pour me some good whiskey, Finch.”

  “Get to it, both of you,” Fincher said. He turned to Abe. “Let’s go inside, break out the whiskey. There’s a hell of a storm a-comin’.”

  “I seen the lightning and them black clouds,” Abe said, jerking a jaunty thumb at the western horizon.

  “Can’t hear the thunder yet, so it’s still far off.”

  The two men turned to the clapboard building with its coal black sides.

  “Gonna be a gully washer for sure, Finch.”

  A gust of wind caught the two men as they reached the door, stung the backs of their necks with grit. Jagged streaks of lightning laced the distant black clouds with quicksilver in a soundless display of pyrotechnics along a wide front.

  The two men pushed through the doorway. Abe pushed the door shut against the brunt of the wind that gusted in their wake. He rubbed sand from the back of his neck and shivered from the cold chill that gripped him.

  Fincher walked through a darkened room toward a glow of yellow lamplight in another part of the compound. He opened the door and doffed his hat. Abe’s wife, Holly, looked up from her sewing at a small table in one corner. She had pieces of yellow cloth stacked at one side and another piece in her hand, cut to resemble the shape of a bell. She finished a stitch and tied off the thread, cutting it with her teeth.

  “They got the silver melted and poured, Finch,” she said. “I like the heat comin’ through the door. It was getting chilly in here.”

  Abe entered the room and looked at his wife as he lifted his hat from his head. He put it on a wooden peg in the wall. Holly smiled at him, her blue eyes twinkling in the lamplight. She was as pudgy as Abe with streaks of gray twining through her dark hair, which was tied tightly in a bun with a scrap of yellow felt.

  Fincher tossed his hat to Abe, who hung it on another wooden peg set in a one-by-four board nailed to the wall.

  “I’ll tell ’em to keep the furnace burnin’,” he said to Holly.

  “Is it going to rain?” she asked.

  Abe answered her. “Like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock,” he said.

  “Abey!” she said.

  Abe walked over to a wooden tool chest and opened the lid. He reached down, and bottles clanked with a sound like Saturday night at the Leadville Saloon. He lifted up a bottle of Old Taylor and carried it to another table in the center of the room, a long scarred slab of cedar sitting on four half stumps that had been debarked and polished to a high sheen. He sat down and opened the bottle.

  “Finch, they’s glasses in that cabinet above the sink.”

  “I know where they are,” Fincher said and opened the cabinet doors, both of them, as if he were about to do a magic trick. He brought four tumblers over to the table and sat down. He left the cabinet doors open, and the glasses and cups glistened dully in the lamplight. His chair legs scraped over the uneven flooring.

  The room was boxlike and bore little resemblance to its former usage as a kind of office and assay room. The sink, of chipped and stained porcelain, had a rusted pipe leading straight down to the floor. The pipe ran outside for several yards but was eaten away in places by rust and was no longer fully buried in the ground.

  “Who else is coming?” Holly asked as she pinched the cloth and cut out an eyehole.

  “Giles and Lenny,” Abe said. He poured whiskey into the tumblers.

  “They back from Leadville? What about Cole?” Holly said, pinching the cloth once again to cut the second eyehole.

  “Cole didn’t come back,” Fincher said, looking straight at Holly with her faded gingham dress hiked up above her knees, her bare legs bone white in the dark under the table. He squinched his eyes and thought of his dead wife, Clarabelle, taken by the cholera in ’69. But he did not think of her withered body, swollen with their unborn son, or her parched lips, but her soft young face in the rain, her mouth pursed like the folded petals of a flower, her hair wet and curly, her eyes dazzling blue under her long lashes. He felt a twinge course through his gut and turned his head to stare with dull dead eyes at Abe as the man pushed a half-full tumbler toward him.

  “To the comin’ storm,” Abe said.

  “Shut up,” Fincher said and raised his head slightly as if he were listening for thunder, or something in his imagination, slinking toward him with a scythe in its hands, its skeletal face cowled under a black robe.

  “Sure, boss,” Abe said, an amiable smile on his lips.

  The door opened a few moments later. Carmichael and Becker tramped in, their jackets open, their faces flushed. The wind followed them in and made the lamplight waver until Becker closed the door.

  “Whew,” Carmichael said. “She’s goin’ to be a bitch-willy in a hour or two.”

  The two men hung their hats on pegs and slipped out of their jackets. The
y hung them on the back of chairs and sat down with a scrape of boots and chair legs.

  Fincher glared at Carmichael.

  Carmichael pulled a tumbler across the table, reached for the bottle of whiskey.

  Fincher grabbed the neck of the bottle and jerked it away from Carmichael.

  “First, you tell me about Cole,” Fincher said.

  “Can’t a man even wet his whistle first?”

  “No. I want to know why Cole didn’t come back with you, Lenny.”

  Becker licked his lips, stared at the bottle just out of his reach.

  Carmichael swallowed hard. He was a lean man with a sharp Adam’s apple just under the skin looking as if it might pierce his neck at any moment. His thin moustache wrinkled as his mouth bent in a frown. His dark eyes stared into Fincher’s pale blue ones, which were as cold as ice.

  “All right, Finch,” he said. “Me and Cole and Giles went to the Clarendon Hotel like you told us to, braced old Mort Taggert to pay up, and he said he wouldn’t pay no more. He said we done gone too far in killin’ Hugh Pendergast. Said we was gonna pay for that. Said the old man, Harry, was goin’ to get us, ever’ one.”

  Fincher’s eyes narrowed to icy slits.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him we never killed nobody and walked out. But we watched the hotel and seen Pendergast come in and register at the desk. Cole went back in after Pendergast met that stage driver in the lobby, and they lit a shuck at the livery. Cole said Pendergast paid for three rooms. He made Taggert show him the register. I wrote down the names.”

  Carmichael pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket and slid it across the table at Fincher.

  Fincher read the names.

  “Cole stayed behind to see who come to take them rooms.”

  “What names?” Abe asked Fincher.

  “Pete Farnsworth, Brad Storm, and Harry Pendergast,” Fincher said.