Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Hate to be the one to bring bad news,” he said quietly, “but there’s half a thousand miles ‘twixt us and Canada, if that’s where we’re running, and Merle won’t make the first two hundred.”

  “Ain’t running to Canada.”

  Shirley nodded. He was as far from his last shave as were the Buckners and the skin was starting to peel off his cheeks and the end of his nose. “I never run with no gangs before I threw in with you, so be sure and stop me when I step out of bounds. Do I get some guesses, or are you just flat out going to tell me where it is I’m going to die?”

  “Won’t be no dying done on our side if this place turns out to be all they claim.” Race fingered the dog-eared scrap of paper. “Your word you won’t laugh?”

  Shirley watched him, then nodded again. His eyes were as clear and guileless as a child’s when his curiosity was aroused.

  The gang leader opened the map and pointed a nail-bitten finger at the artist’s conception of a gap in the great sandstone ridge that divided Wyoming into two equal parts, beside which was printed HOLE-IN-THE-WALL.

  “I ain’t laughing,” Shirley told him, after a moment.

  “Grab your pants!”

  George withdrew his head from the darkened room, then remembered that Diego Menéndez was its occupant and stuck it back in.

  “Agarra sus pantalones!” he repeated in Spanish.

  Without waiting for a response he marched to the next room and fired the same command at Paco. Meanwhile Diego disentangled his limbs from those of the ripe blonde and reached for his boots. She stirred slightly, murmured something, and went back to snoring. There was too much frost on the window to see out, but he could tell it was still dark. The room was overheated and his threadbare long underwear felt clammy against his skin as he stepped into it.

  He entered the hall buttoning his shirt and met Paco, fully dressed and looking alert despite his disheveled hair and scrubby beard. Youth. Diego accompanied him downstairs without a word.

  A Negro handyman, with hair like yellowed cotton and a purple scar that followed the contours of his right cheek and made both of Paco’s look modest by comparison, was laying a fire in the grate when they came into the parlor. There, George and Wild Bill Edwards were standing at a pedestal table they had cleared in order to place a pair of unmatched vases and other small items on top of it. Edwards moved them around like chess pieces.

  “The Divide’s here and they ain’t going to get over it with a wounded man,” he was saying. “Canada’s too far. There’s a half-dozen other ways they can go, but this one’s the smartest. Bet my pearl-handled Colts on it.”

  “Sure you would, after all that sand Comanche Tom made you fire through them made pepper mills out of the barrels. What makes you so sure they won’t just double back?”

  “Would you, if you had a bunch of mean sons of bitches like us hot on your ass?”

  “I say you’re placing too much store in this wounded man of theirs. What if he dies or gets better? And who says they care one way or the other?”

  “The wounded man is Merle Buckner.” Edwards grinned as the Indian’s face registered surprise. “You think I wasn’t working last night? This lawman stuff gets in your blood.”

  “Whores lie just as much as the rest of us.” George shrugged. “All right, let’s just for now say it’s Race’s cousin who’s hit. Who’s to say the others won’t outvote Race and leave Merle behind some rocks somewhere, to bleed out while they make a run for the Divide?”

  “They’re a small gang and they been riding together a spell. I know what that’s like. It gets to be like family. They look out for each other.”

  “Family, hell. One of ‘em’s Indian, and a squaw to boot.

  I wasn’t on furlough last night either,” George added

  “I admit some folks ain’t as tolerant as me. But it’s my guess she looks after Shirley. He may be hell with that trick gun, but someone has to clean it and strap it on. That’s their weak point, their closeness. Take out one member and the gang falls apart.”

  “Say you’re right. Where are they headed?”

  “Where does any bandit head when he’s in Wyoming and his pants are on fire?”

  The Crow thought. “They wouldn’t,” he said then. “They know we’d expect it.”

  “I been telling you and telling you they ain’t got time for fancy. Damn it, will you listen to an outlaw explaining how an outlaw thinks? Remember what the Cap’n said about the marble in the fist?”

  “They can buy protection anywhere. They have forty thousand dollars to spend.”

  Diego perked up at that. He’d been following the gringos’ argument in snatches, but the monetary amount came through loud and clear. He glanced at Paco, who looked bored. He hadn’t understood.

  Edwards said, “The railroad’s offering five thousand for Race head up or feet first. Anyone he could buy protection from would put holes in him and the others for the reward and pick the forty off their bodies. Folks protected Jesse and Frank out of the Christianity in their souls, but Jesse’s been dead a long time and folding money has a nasty crackle.”

  “I wish St. John were here,” George said. “His brain has eyes.”

  “So has a potato, but we ain’t got one of those neither.” The Indian scowled down at the table. “Which one’s the Red Wall, the vase or the soup tureen?”

  Diego had stopped listening. He was busy mentally converting forty thousand dollars into pesos.

  A naked bulb trickled white light down the narrow rubber-runnered staircase that led from Dr. Urquhart’s office to the street. Shadows crouched in the corners and a draft of cold air found its way up inside St. John’s pant legs as he descended, the old wood complaining under his weight so early in the morning. That weight was lighter by thirty dollars now in the doctor’s possession for the past and future care and feeding of Emmett Force Rawlings.

  The Pinkerton had been asleep when St. John looked in on him, but when the chain was pulled on the overhead fixture Rawlings’ eyes had blinked open long enough to recognize the old lawman, then closed as something that looked like a faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. That alone was worth more than the thirty. But St. John’s mood was heavy again as he opened the door and stepped outside. It always was at that time of day, when the sun was still absent and the streets were empty, the corner lamps glowing for no one but him. Today it was worse. It hadn’t always been this way. He remembered waking up warm under a thick counterpane with the icy bedroom air on his face and his wife’s hand touching his shoulder, and the sensation of physical love in the morning. The civilized world was in bed with a warm woman at this hour, not getting set to mount an animal already snorting under the burden of foodstuffs and ride out over frozen ground after men with guns. Not at fifty years old, with rheumatism in the legs and a tired heart.

  The horse was a shaggy black, short-coupled and unmarked, the way he preferred them. It was the one Pierce had chosen for him. Testing the cinch, St. John thought of the little Sunday school teacher stretched out naked on the table in the undertaker’s back room. Dead, he had looked tinier than the posse chief remembered. The .41 slug had had just enough power to exit through the top of his skull after passing through his brain, jellying his gray-streaked hair. The undertaker said it had come rolling out when the hat was removed. St. John had paid ten dollars for a proper headboard and left the corpse to the expert’s care. On his way out he had passed two rooms in which lay Fred Dieterle and the hotel detective, dress-suited in boxes mounded with flowers to cover the smell of the embalming fluid, such niceties for their killer; just plain unlined wood and a hole in Strangers’ Corner. The old lawman wondered what had lain between Pierce and the Nebraskan. There was a young girl mixed up in it somewhere, sure enough.

  Breathing was like inhaling needles. St. John grasped his saddle horn, made a false start, and straddled on the second try. He was glad none of the others had been around to see that. None of them would have commented on his
failure, but the spore of doubt would have spread among them like pollen in a high wind. That was the part of the job that wearied him the most, the inability to react naturally in the face of difficulty. Like a clown with a painted-on face in the circus. He had spent most of his life setting an example for his men and the effort had cost him twenty years. He felt seventy.

  The frozen-stiff macadam rang under his horse’s iron shoes, the only set that seemed to be working in all of Denver at that hour. The noise echoed off the darkened buildings. Behind him, the sun sent a pale scout to warm the sky before it left its bed below the earth’s curvature, but the sky was blue and almost as cold as the night itself. A blind worm of pain so deep it never saw the light stirred in St. John’s right hip joint and began the long crawl down the marrow to his knee.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Hole

  They reached the shale-cluttered slope at the base of the wall late in the day. Ringed in on three sides by stacked buttes, the dry valley graded upward in a semicircle like a ruined coliseum, beyond which the sandstone ridge, more brown than scarlet now that they were almost up to it, stretched for fifty miles as straight as a guitar string. Its top was as even as a board fence but for a perfect triangular notch like a rifle sight where the pass reached its summit. This was the infamous Hole-in-the-Wall, from which a single rifleman, given enough ammunition, could hold a platoon of cavalry in check for a month. So legend had it.

  “I was expecting something more like a proper hole,” Shirley commented. They had dismounted beyond range of the rocks and were helping Merle down, Woman Watching grasping the wounded man by his lapels and heaving. She was as strong as most men.

  “Me too,” grunted Race. “But then nothing’s turned out like I expected since I quit punching cows.”

  “Ever lock one down?” Merle had rallied somewhat. Repeated flushing of his wound had arrested the infection and he was conscious most of the time, though he required support while his bed was prepared. His face was still very white.

  “Shut up and get better,” Race said.

  His cousin chuckled weakly. They wrapped him in blankets and left him sitting on the ground while Race unburdened the mounts and the squaw foraged for kindling. The buffalo chips that made such a fine blue flame in the old days were all gone now, as were the buffalo themselves. Even their bones were gone, to fine china and the sugar refineries back East. The men who had killed them were dead or home by the fire, gumming soft bland food and complaining about the chalk in their joints.

  “Feel it, Jim?” Race dumped the last of the saddles onto the ground, bare of snow thanks to the sheltering buttes. “There’s ghosts in this here valley.”

  “You see one, ask him how my hands are doing.” Shirley whistled through his teeth at the Cherokee, who dropped the wood she had gathered to place a cheroot in his mouth and set fire to it. Then she returned to her labors.

  “Not real ghosts. I mean history. Butch and the Kid and Elzy Lay and Harvey Logan and the Tall Texan and the rest. They all came through here regular, which is why they call this the Outlaw Trail instead of the Deadwood stage route, which is what it was. We’re in famous company.”

  “They’re all dead or in hiding. Company like that I can do without.”

  Race sighed. “You know what your trouble is, Jim? You got no romance in your soul.”

  “Guess I had it blasted out of me.” The cripple blew smoke. It drifted up out of sight and was shredded by the wind off the rocks.

  Woman Watching built a good Indian fire scarcely larger than a man’s hand (“white man make fire big, sit back, no good. Indian make fire small, stay close, get warm”), next to which was placed a large can of beans on a shard of shale. When it was sizzling she wrapped a cloth around it and passed it among the fugitives with a spoon in it, feeding Shirley herself, until it was empty. Then the last of Race’s bottles made the rounds. When it got to Merle he lifted it in both hands, spilling more down his chin than he swallowed. A high flush stained his pale cheeks like blood on a fish’s belly. The squaw accepted the bottle and started to raise it to Shirley’s lips, but he took it between his stumps and helped himself to a long draft. Race drank last and started the operation all over again.

  “Woman can have some too if she wants,” he told Shirley. “This ain’t downtown.”

  “She don’t drink.”

  Merle laughed feebly. “Injun don’t drink’s like a pump without washers.”

  “That’s what her husband thought till a bunch of vigilantes took him from a saloon in Guthrie and strung him to a telegraph pole. He was too drunk to fight back.”

  “They lynched him for drinking?” In the firelight Race’s eyes were big.

  “They figured he put it to someone’s daughter or niece or something. White woman.”

  “Did he?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Thing is, neither did they.”

  Woman Watching said nothing, but her bright black eyes darted between Race and the cripple, understanding. She passed the bottle to Shirley, who held it out to the younger Buckner in his stumps without partaking. Race was too busy watching the flames to accept it. Shirley lowered the vessel to the ground between them.

  “Hell of a thing to do to a man, run a rope around his neck and stretch it,” Race said.

  “Depends on who does it.” Merle huddled deeper into his blanket. It was dark out now, and though the fire roasted their faces their backs were growing cold. “I seen a fellow take the drop in Helena. Hangman snugged the knot up under his left ear so that when they opened the trap his neck snapped like a dry cornstalk. Sounded like a pistol shot. He didn’t kick but a damn little. There’s worse ways to die.”

  Not for me,’ said Race. “I’d take a bullet in the gut and go slow before I’d let them do that to me.”

  “Wasn’t no snap when they hung the injun, Woman says,” put in Shirley. He strangled slow. His face turned black and his pants fell down and he disgraced himself.” He raised the bottle, drank.

  The squaw fed the fire.

  “You figure you killed that lawman at the wash?” Race asked Merle finally.

  “I sure as hell tried.” He drew his blanket tighter.

  “You said that before.”

  “Meant it both times.”

  “I was sort of counting on us not having to do that. Ever.”

  “He was going to do it to us,” Merle argued. “That posse wasn’t there to bring us fresh horses. What the hell was I supposed to do, kiss him?” His flush deepened.

  “Yeah, killing him did us a lot more good.”

  “He killed Carroll, for chrissake!”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “It’s done,” Shirley said calmly. “So shut up.”

  Race, who had started to rise, sank back down onto his blanket. His cousin was shivering in spite of the sweat glistening on his face. The squaw threw her own blanket around his shoulders on top of his. He reached across for the bottle and splashed some of its contents down his throat, gulping audibly. His hands shook. “Damn it, I’m bleeding again.”

  Shirley signaled to Woman Watching, who got up and went for the bandages and peroxide. The cold was strengthening. As she worked on Merle, the others watched the flames and drank and listened to the wind humming among the rocks as through a gallows.

  At dawn they helped Merle into his saddle and began the long climb to the pass. Ice glittered treacherously between the rocks that paved the ascent, slowing their progress. The day was half gone when white smoke blossomed in the high notch and a fragment of shale in Race’s path split with a loud pop. The report followed.

  Dawn stole into Chloe Ziegler’s room, igniting dust motes and limning her profile, so like a man’s, against the pillow and the floral-print wallpaper next to the bed. St. John lay beside her in that blissful half-world between waking and rising. His heart was functioning normally and for once his rheumatism wasn’t bothering him. It was there—it never left entirely—but he had learned to w
elcome the remission of pain as he had once welcomed its absence. She kept the room cold, bringing memories of his wife before things went wrong.

  Chloe stirred and mined a bare, slightly sinewy arm out from under the spread to fling across his chest. She wore a white cotton nightgown fastened at the shoulders. From the base of her neck to her hairline and from the break of her wrist to her fingertips her skin was dark, shades darker than her arms and bosom. St. John remembered that her chest and backside were flat and that the flesh of her thighs concealed muscles that gripped like taut cables. She was the kind of woman he used to see a lot of on the frontier before the railroads flooded it with Gibson girls.

  “You plow like a farmer,” she said sleepily.

  He was holding her hand, stroking the fine ridge of callus at the base of her fingers. “That good or bad?”

  “Um.”

  “You better answer. I’m vain as a stallion.” Playfully he pried her fingers apart.

  She withdrew her hand. “Well, it beats those thirty-second wonders from the Bar G.”

  “How do I compare with Race Buckner?”

  She turned over onto her back. She was wide awake now, staring at the seam where the wall and ceiling met. She made no answer.

  “There’s ways and ways to track a man,” he explained. “Most read sign, but I was never good at that. I generally favor planting my feet where he’s planted his and seeing what comes of it. If he stayed in a hotel overnight, I try to get the same room, sleep in the bed he slept in. If he ate in a restaurant, I order what he did. I drink his brand of whiskey, smoke his cigars, and if he’s a reading man, I read the books and newspapers he left behind. Judge Parker smiled when I told him that. He called me Swami Ike when we were alone. But by the time the Congress closed down his court and I ran up eighty-six arrests on a hundred and two warrants, he wasn’t smiling anymore. When he was sick, just before he died, he called me in and said, ‘Ike, if I had nine more men like you, I’d have disbanded the court myself, because there wouldn’t be anyone left to arrest.’” He fell silent, remembering the strict Ohioan.