Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  Chapter Eleven

  Pinto Creek Hospitality

  After two minutes inside, George came to the door of the soddy and lifted his Winchester high over his head, the leather sling drooping from it like a sloppy bowstring. St. John put heels to his dun and cantered across the empty plain, followed closely by Pierce and the others. The sun was a bright new penny in a scraped blue sky and the snow was melting, leaving leprous white patches on the dead yellow grass.

  “Deserted,” reported the Indian, as St. John swung down, holding back a wince when his boots touched ground and his hip joints locked. He pretended to stretch his aching muscles while waiting for them to loosen.

  “Not for long,” he said, sniffing fresh manure in the empty corral. George’s gelding was hitched to the weathered rail fence.

  “There were more than five horses in there. Snow’s too patchy to say just how many. Hoof prints are all confused.”

  “Nine or ten anyway, counting replacements. If this is the right place.” St. John’s stiffness gave ground grudgingly, leaving needles behind. “What’s inside?”

  “A marble ballroom and a string of St. Louis whores. What do you expect?”

  “It’s the right place,” said Pierce.

  Of all of them, the Sunday school teacher looked freshest: chin scraped pink, burnsides trimmed, clean bandana knotted around his neck concealing his large Adam’s apple. Most of the water in his canteen went toward washing. His face was Indianlike under the soft black hat, and with his beaver coat rolled away behind his saddle he resembled a child in a man’s cutdown clothes. He would go on looking young until the morning he woke up old. St. John had never known a man with feet so small. Pierce was standing on a bare patch studying the hut and grounds.

  “That farmer you talked to said this is the only abandoned homestead still standing for fifty miles,” George told the old lawman, plainly hating the idea of agreeing with Pierce. “It’s secluded and it is at the end of a good horse’s range.”

  The posse chief said nothing. He looped his reins over the fence and went inside.

  After the sun’s warmth, the hut felt dank and cold. The calcined remains of a recent fire lay heaped on the floor of the stone fireplace, its lye smell permeating the single room. St. John walked around, touching the springy surface of the walls, stirring the ashes with a crooked stick he found leaning next to the chimney, placing his hands on the back of first one wobbly chair, then the other, testing them with his weight. Rawlings and George watched him from the empty doorway.

  “What’s he doing?” whispered the Pinkerton.

  “Getting the feel of the place.”

  “What for?”

  “Sometimes it tells him what the men he’s after are up to. I’ve seen him do it before.”

  “You mean like mind reading?” Rawlings’ lips curled. “Kind of. Only with him it works. Sometimes. Not always.”

  “I’m beginning to think I should have stayed in Cheyenne?”

  George shushed him.

  St. John had been standing in the middle of the dirt floor, thumbs hooked inside his gun belt, making chewing motions with his long jaw. Now he relaxed visibly, his shoulders slack.

  “Anything?” asked the Indian.

  He shook his head. “Been too long since the last time.”

  The others entered, except for the Mexicans, who preferred the outdoors. Wild Bill Edwards exclaimed and picked up something from the darkened corner opposite the fireplace. He examined it and handed it to St. John, who studied both sides. A weary smile broke the stormy surface of his face.

  “What is it?” asked Rawlings. The old lawman gave him the scrap. He read the inscription. “Five hundred dollars.’ This is part of a bearer bond!”

  Edwards glanced at Pierce. “How’d you know this was it?”

  “It’s the place I’d pick.” He moved one of the chairs over to the door and sat down, drawing out his Bible. Tiny dust motes swam in the sunlight slanting over his shoulder.

  Rawlings said, “Why burn them? They’re as good as cash.”

  St. John flicked a finger at the charred piece. “Say you’re a clerk in a dry goods store. Wouldn’t you look twice at the man who paid for two pair of overalls and a set of red flannels with one of those?”

  “Still, it takes guts to put a match to eleven thousand dollars,” George observed.

  “We knew they had plenty of those,” said St. John. “What we didn’t know was that they had this much brains. You recall Nate Blackfeather?”

  The Crow nodded. “Choctaw breed. We arrested him for introducing whiskey in the Strip. Judge Parker fined him a hundred dollars.”

  “You recall how long we looked for him?”

  “Off and on for two years. He gave us more trouble than Cherokee Bill and Ned Christie put together.”

  “He didn’t confide in anyone, not even his mother, and he could change skins like a snake,” St. John reminded him. “We finally got him posing as a preacher outside McAlester. Parker figured the United States of America spent two thousand dollars collecting that hundred.”

  “Two days later he was back out introducing. We never did get him a second time.”

  “He was smart,” said St. John.

  “He was smart,” George agreed.

  “Lord deliver us from smart outlaws.” He turned to Rawlings. “What’s the nearest town?”

  “Pinto Creek. North, about five miles.”

  St. John strode out, his heavy shadow gliding across the page Pierce was reading. “Let’s go see what desperadoes’ horses look like.”

  Pinto Creek dozed in the afternoon sun, two rows of clapboard buildings snoring into each other’s face across a muddy street as wide as a pasture. Telephone wires sliced right triangles between the false fronts and the poles towering overhead. Shiny with creosote, the poles flanked the road like pickets, outriders for the twentieth century. Or, thought Wild Bill Edwards, a firing squad for the nineteenth.

  The thawing street sucked toothlessly at hoofs and fetlocks. A butcher, his face sunk in rings of fat like a tallow stub, watched the riders from the doorway of his shop. His leather apron was peppered with blood and bits of raw meat clinging in half circles like pink leeches. He was the only human in sight. Sunlight bronzed a dog sleeping with its clotted chin over the frayed edge of the boardwalk nearby.

  A Reo occupied a space where three horses could be tethered in front of the town marshal’s office. The Mexicans, who had never seen a motorcar close up, leapt down from their saddles, drew fingers through the powder of dried mud on the fly-green finish and across the grainy leather seats, kicked the bicycle wheels and grinned like apes at their reflections in the shiny brass of the headlamps. Edwards attempted to explain to them through pantomime and sound effects how the vehicle worked. Ignoring the buggy-like contraption, St. John and George tied up at the hitching rail and mounted the boardwalk to the office door.

  It was locked. A hand-lettered card in the window read BACK IN 20 MINUTES-BUT DON’T COUNT ON IT. On the other side of the glass stood a desk and a black iron stove under a fine coat of indoor dust. A door at the back apparently led to the cells.

  “Split up,” St. John told the others. “Ask around. Find out if anyone’s tried to sell a bunch of well-used horses hereabouts in the last couple of days. Bill, you go with Paco and Diego. Rawlings, with me.”

  Which left George and Midian Pierce partners. They glared at each other and moved off together without a word.

  The livery stable was closed for lunch. There were no customers in either the general merchandise or the bank, just bored employees wearing aprons or watches and chains, their collars wilting from the unseasonable weather’s surprise attack on their prickly long underwear. St. John’s query drew suspicious looks and the suggestion that they check with the marshal. No one seemed to know where the marshal was. Passing the dress shop display window, the old lawman caught a glimpse of his shadowed jowls and clothes streaked with horse lather and remarked to Rawlings that
they had best find the marshal before he found them and arrested them for vagrancy. The Pinkerton, ragged of beard and stained with mud to the knees, agreed. They were on their way back to the office for another look when Pierce hailed them from across the street.

  George was nowhere in sight. The Sunday school teacher was standing in the barbershop, watching a barber with spit-curls and a waxed moustache using long shiny scissors to trim the hair around the ears of a clerkly-looking man in his thirties, whose black muttonchops made his face look fuller than it was. The bare steel muzzle of a .44 revolver poked out from under the white cloth that covered the seated man from neck to knees. He wore brown pinstriped trousers over brown leather boots. The barber’s hand shook as he snipped away.

  The shop smelled of leather and shaving soap and lime, man-smells. A cuckoo clock on the wall next to the smoked mirror knocked out the seconds with a hollow wooden sound against the crisp snicking of the scissors.

  “Marshal here wants a word with you,” Pierce said. He stood with his hands well out from his body, watching the man with a snake’s patience.

  “Ask him does he do all his talking over a gun, or are we special?” St. John kept his coat buttoned over his Peacemaker. Rawlings buttoned his, even though it was warm inside with the sun streaming through the clean plate-glass window.

  “Who are you?” demanded the marshal. He had a bitten voice. Told the answer, he snorted. “You are like hell. Ike St. John’s back East by now, raising hell with the Republicans.”

  “Weather’s nicer here. What’s wrong, Marshal? My man here make trouble?”

  “I didn’t give him that chance.” The scissors slipped, nicking him in front of the ear. Blood filled the nick and rolled out over the bottom edge. Without taking his eyes from the three strangers, the injured man reached up with his free hand and disarmed the barber.

  “Clear out, Tim. I need both ears to hold up my reading glasses.”

  Gratefully the barber left, ducking through a curtained doorway at the rear. The marshal stood, keeping the trio covered, and snatched off the cloth, a handful of which he pressed to the cut to staunch the bleeding. He was in white shirt sleeves and a brown striped vest with a gold chain from which dangled a Mason’s ring. “Your man said he was looking for someone selling horses. I been expecting that horse thief’s friend to pay us a visit.”

  The old lawman nodded. “So he was here.”

  “Was and is. I got him locked up over at the jail. Stay back there!” He raised the gun as St. John took a step forward. “You’ll move when I say.”

  “What’d you arrest him for?” asked St. John, retreating.

  “Suspicion.” He tossed the cloth into -the barbers steel basin. The red stain looked artificial on the white linen, like rouge. “He come in yesterday leading four played-out mounts and tried to sell them at the livery. Livery man didn’t like his looks and called me.”

  “Did he have a bill of sale?”

  “That’s why I arrested him. It was dated in Colorado just last Friday. Why buy horses just to sell them across the border less than a week later for the same money? I’m holding him till I get word on a wire I sent down to Pueblo this morning. That’s where he says he bought them, from a rancher named Wilder. Now I guess I’m holding all of you, too.”

  Rawlings said, “I’m a Pinkerton operative. I have identification in my coat.”

  “We’ll come around to that. Right now let’s have your hardware right here on the chair.” He pounded the brown leather upholstery.

  There was a pause. The marshal’s eyes set like concrete behind his revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson American, as big and heavy as a boat anchor. St. John was conscious of a crowd forming in the street behind him.

  “Do what he says.” He started unfastening buttons. “Quicker it’s done the quicker we can talk business.”

  “Now I know how you got to be as old as you are, Pop. Slow now, one at a time. You first.”

  Pierce was the last to surrender his weapon. When the Navy Colt had joined St. John’s Peacemaker and the Pinkerton’s pocket Remington on the seat of the barber chair: “You look like a derringer man, preacher. Flop it down there or turn your pockets inside out if you ain’t.”

  Reluctantly Pierce added the little two-shot to the pile.

  “All right, let’s see that identification you talked about.”

  Rawlings showed it to him. “I’ve been assigned to the Buckner case,” he said. “This is Irons St. John and that’s Midian Pierce, one of his men. There are others.”

  “I’ll be damned.” The marshal looked from the private badges to St. John. “You really are him, ain’t you? Wait till the wife hears I braced Ike St. John! She’s always throwing it up to me about how her brother shook hands with Teddy Roosevelt when he was police commissioner in New York City.”

  “Your wife’s brother was police commissioner in New York City?” St. John was skeptical.

  The marshal looked puzzled, then his face cleared. He laughed. “He fixes pipes. It was Teddy that was the commissioner.”

  “The gun,” Pierce reminded him.

  He glanced down at the revolver as if startled to find it still in his grasp, still pointed at them. ”Oh, sure.” He let down the hammer and poked the gun back into its holster.

  St. John said, “White of you, considering you got four more at your back.”

  The marshal paled a little and turned. Edwards was standing in front of the open curtain gripping his sharpshooter’s pistol, flanked by the Mexicans. The barrels of their heavy Villista Colts, browned to avoid glinting in the sun, looked like hollow logs in the electric light. Beyond them, framed in the sunlit doorway leading out of the back room, George watched the alley, fingers curled around the butt of the Starr above the waistband of his trousers.

  “How’d they know what was going on?” asked the peace officer, turning back. His voice came from just behind his tongue.

  “Lessons cost extra,” St. John informed him. “Pay for the haircut.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Carroll

  A twelve-inch plank formed a sorry bridge across the street of muck, its sagging middle submerged beneath a brown lake so that the ends curved up like pieces of two planks. The party started across single file with the marshal in front. The crowd that had gathered outside the barbershop watched them without following. They looked like a parade in mufti. The butcher was still in his doorway. The dog had moved with the sun to another part of the boardwalk.

  “You make it a practice to leave your prisoners unguarded?” inquired St. John when they were in front of the office. He watched the peace officer, whose name was Kendall, sorting through the keys on his ring.

  “My one and only deputy’s home with the ague. And you ain’t seen our jail.”

  The air in the office was sour with the memory of boiled coffee, old cigars, and older sweat. The marshal led the way through the door in back and up a steep flight of narrow, squeaking stairs to four cells facing each other across a cramped aisle. Solid oak clunked under their footsteps. The Menéndezes had remained outside as usual; a series of beeps out front revealed that they had discovered the Reo’s horn.

  The lone prisoner was an old man with short white whiskers and long hair hanging over his ears from a fringe around his naked scalp. He was sitting on the edge of his iron cot with one boot off and a sock on his hand, sourly contemplating his fingers poking through ragged holes in the toe. The stale dirty smell of the blackened wool hung in the atmosphere. There were only two windows on that floor, very small and very high up.

  “Sure wish you’d give me that needle, Marshal,” he said without looking up.

  “And let you stick a vein? Besides, who’s going to see the holes if you keep your boots on? You’re long past whoring age.”

  “If I thought that, I’d of stuck myself long before this. That ain’t it, though. I seen this pitcher once of Bob Dalton after he got hisseif shot to pieces in Coffeyville. His boots was off and his toes w
as sticking through a hole in his sock. I don’t mind winding up dead, but I sure don’t welcome the idee of someone taking a pitcher of me with my bare toes showing.”

  “Wouldn’t be so bad if you washed them once in a while. I brung visitors.”

  “Seen ‘em. Don’t know a one of ‘em.” He turned the sock inside out and pulled it back on his foot. It was just as black on that side.

  “He don’t know you,” the marshal told St. John.

  “I heard. What’s your name, Dad?”

  “It ain’t Dad.” He stamped on his boot. There was a crust of dried mud on the rundown heel.

  “Name on the bill of sale was L. C. Wood.” Kendall clanked the keys idly in his coat pocket. It was a brown pinstriped suitcoat that had matched his vest and trousers before it began to fade. He wore a brown fedora with a brown silk band.

  “Well, Mr. L. C. Wood,” said St. John, “you mind telling me where you got those horses you were selling?”

  “Done answered that one.” Glancing up at the marshal: “Anything yet from Pueblo?”

  Kendall shook his head. “Appears your Mr. Wilder is a hard man to get hold of. If he exists.”

  St. John said, “He exists. This bunch wouldn’t be dumb enough to use stolen horses on a train robbery. Right, Mr. L. C. Wood?”

  The old man made a perverse suggestion and stretched out on the cot, crossing his cracked boots. Five seconds later he was snoring. He hadn’t looked at St. John once.

  “We’ll take him off your hands,” the latter told Kendall.

  The marshal looked apologetic. “I got to have something, a warrant or something.”

  St. John nudged Rawlings. “Hand me one of those John Does.”

  The Pinkerton produced a flat wallet and took out a paper folded lengthwise. St. John accepted it and gave it to the marshal, who unfolded it, reading it at arm’s length.

  “He’ll need a horse,” said the old lawman. “A good one, but not too fast. In case he breaks.”