by E. R. Slade
Lon Pike hauled the body of a murdered deputy into town, then tackled a gun-wielding drunk who was out to shoot Marshal Everson. Council chairman Orville Tuft, whose bank has been robbed, wanted to make Lon Marshal instead of Everson, and Lon, inveigled by Tuft’s pretty daughter Zinnia, agreed. However, on reflection, he decided it was smarter to take the deputy’s job instead. But Everson looked increasingly likely to be in cahoots with the robbers – and he might just have sent the previous deputy to his death when he learned too much.
THE MARSHAL OF WHITBURG
By E. R. Slade
Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Clark
First Smashwords Edition: December 2015
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.
Cover image © 2015 by Edward Martin
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.
Chapter One
Somewhere just ahead there was gunplay. Lon Pike pulled up and sat his horse, listening.
The trail had been trending downward through a handsome stand of fir and lodgepole pine. Now he was in some thickets of young growth that had sprung up in response to a lightning-set fire of some years back. The thickets prevented Lon from seeing anything of what was happening ahead.
The sporadic popping of pistols continued. He tried to estimate how many guns he was listening to, but it was difficult. Maybe three or four, he thought, but hadn’t too much confidence in his guess.
The trouble with this was that it was very late in the day and he wanted to get to town before nightfall if he could. This wasn’t familiar country to him and he’d been warned back at the line camp he’d stopped at last night that the final couple of miles of the trail down to the valley was tricky in the dark. It was a steep path, often only wide enough for one horse, with a drop-off on one side and a cliff going straight up on the other. “Hoss loses footing and you’re done for,” the wizened old cowhand had said.
And he’d also said there was just one way down, so it wasn’t smart to get off the trail.
The pistol battle, if that was what it was, continued. Sometimes the firing was in close bursts, other times it was more spaced; and then there’d be a break and he’d think maybe it was over. But then there’d be more.
He supposed he could make camp here in the trees. Dry camp it would have to be since there was no sign of water. The fellow at the line shack had been about out of water, too—if fact was headed back to the ranch today on account of it—so Lon hadn’t been able to fill his canteen, now down to about a cupful.
He’d had far worse hardships in his travels than making do with a cup of water overnight, but he wouldn’t mind getting to town, all the same. He’d been looking forward to a bath and shave all day.
Actually, if he was careful about it, he could probably slip past the gunfight without being noticed, so long as he tried it before it got dark. It really shouldn’t be that difficult: the trail wasn’t narrow or hard yet. He thought if the gunfire didn’t stop very soon he’d pull left off the trail, which was the downhill side along here.
Being preoccupied with his thoughts, he wasn’t quite aware when the shooting finally did stop. He suddenly realized after a few minutes that he hadn’t heard a shot in some time. It had certainly been a much longer silence than any of the previous pauses in the action had been.
He listened intently, his pony shifting footing under him impatiently. Blacky never had much liked standing around waiting.
He could hear the light breeze washing through the thickets around him, but that was all.
Then it wasn’t all. He heard the faint sound of a hoof against stone, then in a minute or so he heard three sets of hoofbeats quite clearly, at a brisk walk. Definitely coming up the trail toward him.
He could stay where he was and see what the riders had to say about the pistol shots. But instinct told him it might be better to get off into the thickets out of sight and size up the riders before exposing himself.
He found a good place some distance uphill of the trail from which he could look through branches but not be seen himself, and he waited. Very shortly, here came two burly men looking like any pair of cowpokes, bedrolls on behind, one of them with another horse, saddled, on a lead. Slung from the empty saddle were two sacks, one either side, evidently quite heavy. Both men wore six-shooters but Lon saw no rifles.
He pondered what he ought to do. If these men had just killed somebody, how smart was it to confront them? On the other hand, didn’t he have some responsibility to find out what he could and pass the information along to the law in town?
With one corner of his mouth pulled ruefully back into his cheek, Lon climbed on Blacky and swung him around to ride so as to cut the trail a hundred yards ahead of the riders—easy to do by shortcutting a switchback. When they came across him, he was jogging along on the trail at an easy pace.
Both of them dropped their right hands to their weapons the moment they saw him. At ten paces, they hauled rein and so did Lon.
“Howdy,” he said to them, making it as casual and friendly as he could, keeping his own hand well away from his Colt. “That you doing the shooting?’
Both men eyed him suspiciously. Lon didn’t care for the look of these two. Each had the same thick, wide nose, coarse features, thick rough hands, and even the same week-old stubble on their jaws. But none of that would have unsettled him had it not been for the small, mean eyes. They had the flat look he’d once seen in the eyes of a condemned man who seemed not to care half a whit that he was about to die. The most obvious difference between these two was that one had a very prominent scar from halfway up his left cheek to the corner of his mouth, as though a knife had once cut him wide open there and the injury had healed on its own.
“What shootin’?” the man not scarred asked in a low voice that made you think of dead weeds rattling in a cold fall breeze.
“Thought I heard shooting off ahead somewhere,” Lon said offhandedly. “Maybe it was from some other direction. Confounded hard to tell anything about direction of a sound up here sometimes.”
“Yeah,” the other said.
“What you hauling?” Lon asked, hoping he sounded like a trusting, unsuspecting chucklehead.
“You ask too many questions, mister,” said the other.
“I do? Just passing the time of day, that’s all. Well,” he went on, taking hold of the brim of his hat with the thumb and forefinger of his gun hand, “I got to get to town. Nice meeting you gents.” And he edged his pony past them, still holding the brim of his hat.
He caught a faint whiff of gun smoke from them as he passed, their eyes following him as steady as if they’d been a pair of cats. As he went by the saddled horse, he tried not to seem excessively curious—or incurious—about the pair of heavily weighted burlap sacks the animal was carrying. Whatever was inside seemed slightly lumpy. He thought that if the sacks were full of gold or silver coin they’d look about as they did.
Once a few paces beyond them, he glanced back, let go his hat brim and opened his hand in a wave of farewell; then he let the hand drop to his thigh as he rode on around a bend in the trail.
At least they hadn’t shot him. It did cross his mind though that he hadn’t learned muc
h for the risk he had taken. But once he’d told the law in town what he’d seen, he’d have done the best he could and it would no longer be his responsibility to worry about what was going on.
His spirits had lifted quite a bit by the time he had gone a hundred yards past the point where he’d initially left the trail. He thought he’d probably already passed the place where the gunfight had happened and he’d have no more of the incident to trouble himself about. He went back to thinking about what a bath was going to feel like, and whether he could find an outfit in town that made something more interesting to eat than the usual bacon, beans, and biscuits.
The trail suddenly got narrow, going through a natural cut in the rock. He rounded a turn and there in the middle of the path lay a body.
“So they did kill somebody,” he muttered, his formerly lifting spirits contracting into a hard knot in the pit of his stomach.
He pulled to a halt and got heavily down from his horse, squatted next to the dead man.
And he certainly was dead; a bullet had passed through his forehead. Also, other bullets had hit him in the shoulder, the leg, and in the side, all of which wounds had bled at least some. He had a holster but Lon couldn’t find the gun, and there were no shells in the belt. The body was still warm.
In the failing light, he looked at the face. A man no older than he was, probably a few years younger, he thought. Hardly more than twenty.
He remembered his brother who had been shot to death back in Missouri two years ago. There’d been the same look of surprised pain on his face. He also remembered how angry he’d been at the newspaper editor who’d shot him—shot him because he didn’t like being called the liar he was. The editor wasn’t prosecuted. Lon had come close to calling the man out, but in the end, he hadn’t. Instead, he’d left Missouri and come further west.
Lon wondered if this man had a brother or sister or mother or somebody else who would care if he died. Somebody would have to tell them what had happened to him.
Lon stood up, lifted off his hat and wiped sweat from his brow, for all it was cool and getting colder with the mountain night coming on. He stood there getting control of his thoughts for a couple of minutes before attempting anything practical.
Then he scouted around a little in case there were other bodies, but there was nothing to find. He didn’t make any search for the man’s horse since he was pretty sure he’d already seen it—lugging a pair of heavy sacks.
He loaded the body on behind his saddle and continued toward town, thinking.
Had the three of them robbed a bank or a stage and had a falling out? Or had the young man been carrying the bags and the other two took them from him after some gunplay? Or what?
Well, it wasn’t his job to figure it out.
Still, he couldn’t help but speculate. If the young man had been on their trail, he might well have been ambushed. It was a perfect place for it. They could have been waiting for him on either side of the opening in the rock. When shot at, he’d likely have swung his horse around and taken cover back around the bend, probably with some holes in him. They’d likely have traded lead for a while. Then maybe one of the ambushers climbed around and got close enough to plug him through the forehead. It could have been a lucky shot, but more likely somebody got pretty close—and was a good marksman into the bargain. A man’s forehead was a small target for a pistol at anything much beyond point blank range.
The trail now became as the man at the line shack had described. Three feet wide with a cliff to his left and a sheer drop-off into the gathering shadows to the right. For quite some time he had enough to think about without speculating on the shooting.
It was an hour after sunset when he finally reached easy ground and trended down through a small patch of woods and came in sight of Whitburg, which by night was just a scattering of lamp lit windows. He jogged on down and as he got nearer he could hear a tinny piano and an inebriated-sounding chorus of tone-deaf men making a familiar bawdyhouse song just barely recognizable. What he didn’t hear was any shooting, which was a hopeful sign.
He’d tired of towns whose boisterous “peace” was continually punctuated by the gunshots of those who seemed to be unacquainted with any other way of settling disagreements. The incident that crystallized for him all the reasons why he could go without ever witnessing another gunfight had come a few months ago when one man had shot dead another over a difference of opinion about how many legs a horse fly has.
Yet here he was riding into town with a bullet-riddled body behind his saddle. He never seemed to quite escape gunplay, wherever he went or whatever kind of job he took. Still, he ought to count his blessings since it was also true that he’d never actually had to kill anybody himself and only rarely had he been directly involved in anything resembling a shootout. He’d always made it a point to give troublemakers plenty of room and to stay out of arguments.
His father had once told him that the best way to get along with men who liked to pick fights was to let them have their own way. He said usually it wasn’t too long before having their own way got them in over their heads and likely jailed or hanged. The old man had known what he was talking about. Lon had seen these observations confirmed plenty of times since.
He rode in from the south end of town. There seemed to be not a lot to the place, just two rows of buildings facing each other across a rough, rutted street, dry and dusty in the current droughty conditions. About half the buildings were false fronts and about half the rest looked flimsy enough to blow down in the next big wind. There was one brick building of some pretense—the bank. There was also one fairly imposing house that would have seemed more in place in a city back east. It stood beside the bank.
The building Lon was looking for turned out to be a bit beyond these and on the other side of the street. It was a false front with the words “DANCE HALL” written across it ten feet above the board sidewalk in foot-high gold letters. But what was of interest to Lon was a much smaller sign to the left which said, “Town Marshal.” Under it was a door.
There was also a window next to the door and through it Lon could see a thickset man standing behind a desk. The man was slowly turning over a stack of what appeared to be wanted posters. With his head tipped down, two thirds of his face seemed to be jowls.
Lon threw his horse’s reins over the rail in front, adjusted his hat, and opened the door.
The other looked up quickly, squinting over the top of his lamp, trying to see who the visitor was.
“You the marshal?” Lon asked.
“That’s right. What do you want?” It wasn’t really friendly, but it wasn’t unfriendly, either.
“I’ve just come down the mountain from the pass and I ran across a body on the trail.”
The marshal stepped quickly around the desk, his eyes getting a glint of real interest. “Body?” he asked. “Whose body?”
“That I don’t know. Come on out and see. I’m a stranger in these parts so I don’t know who it is.”
The marshal clapped on his Stetson and hurried out after Lon.
“Afraid of that,” he said the moment he caught a glimpse of the face by such lamplight as escaped the office through the window.
“Know him?” Lon asked. “He’s shot up some as you can see.”
“Billy was my deputy.”
“Deputy?” Lon asked, startled. “I never saw a badge.”
“He had one. Where’s his gun?”
“Didn’t see a gun anywhere, just the holster.”
“Come back in here,” the marshal said. It was clearly an order, not an invitation. Once inside, the marshal added, “Sit down,” also an order.
Then he opened a door which let into the dance hall and called to a man in there who came into the office and shut the door after himself.
“Vern, go get the doc,” he told the fellow. “Tell him Billy’s been killed and I want to know whatever he can figure out from a look at the body.”
“Billy?” Vern said, clearly su
rprised. “Where?”
“On the back of a horse outside. Now git along.”
After Vern had gone, the marshal sat down, shifted the lamp to one side, the wanted posters to the other, then squinted across the scarred old desk at Lon appraisingly.
“Just who are you, mister?” he asked.
“Lon Pike.”
“That don’t mean nothin’ to me. Where you from?”
“Originally? Cambridge.”
“Cambridge? Where’s that?”
“It’s a town near Boston. Back east.”
“Boston!” His sparse black eyebrows moved up, then down. “What in tarnation are you doing away out here?”
“If you’re looking to make your fortune they tell you to go west,” Lon said, dryly.
“They do, do they. Well, it’s true some people make a fortune. But I’ll wager you ain’t one of them.”
“You’re right, I’m not. You want to talk more about my bad luck or do you want to hear a couple of things I can tell you that might or might not have something to do with what happened to your deputy?”
“Let’s get something straight,” the marshal said, leaning toward him, brow knotting. “I ask the questions. You answer ’em. That clear?”
“Sure.”
The marshal drew himself up with a long pull of air, then cleared his throat. “You come through the pass?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago was that?”
“This morning.”
“Now then, exactly where did you find Billy’s body?”
Lon described the place. Then he added, “It looked like a perfect place for an ambush. And I may have heard the shooting. Then two men on horseback with another horse on a lead came up the trail past me. I didn’t much like the look of them. There were two burlap sacks full of something heavy slung from the extra horse’s saddle.”
“That so,” the marshal said noncommittally. He squinted again and flexed his lips.
There was a sudden commotion in the dance hall and then the door from there burst open and a glassy-eyed man swayed into the office.
