Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  “And humping the same whore is purely in the line of duty.” Chloe spoke flatly.

  “Not purely,” he said, coming out of his reverie. “Man’s got to cut the bear loose from time to time or bust.”

  “I ought to charge you a crystal-ball fee on top of the usual.” She pounded her pillow, bunched it behind her back, and sat up. “Well, what did you find out?”

  “Nothing,” he confessed. “I clean forgot all about the Buckners.”

  There was no immediate response. Then he felt a tremor in the mattress and realized she was stifling laughter. He grinned shamefacedly. Propping himself up on one elbow, he fumbled a cigar and a box of matches out of his coat hanging on the back of the chair beside the bed. Gray smoke uncoiled toward the east window.

  “I know some men who voted for you for Congress,” she said. “They were on their way to Missouri. Democrats was paying fifty dollars a vote plus traveling expenses.”

  “No wonder I lost out. Republicans were paying a hundred.”

  “That why you went back to marshaling?”

  “I’m used to eating. Can’t seem to buck the habit.”

  She said, “I get a lot of politicians. Carpetbaggers from back East and the grass-roots fellows that grew up on potato farms and took mail-order courses to get to be lawyers. You ain’t like them. You run off at the mouth same as them but you don’t talk about the same things. You’re better off shed of them.”

  “Bull can’t put on pants and be a man, that it?”

  “Who said they was men?” She paused. “I suppose when you catch up with Race you’ll kill him.”

  “Not if there’s a better way.”

  “I hear that a lot from lawmen. There never is, when the reward’s the same dead as alive. Man with the dollar sign on his head always gets shot resisting arrest or trying to escape. That way he don’t have to be fed or tied up on the way back.”

  “I’d take the trouble.”

  “Sure you would. You ain’t running for office now. Stop trying to get my vote.”

  He said, “The edge wore off killing years ago. I never did enjoy it, but I got to where it didn’t make my guts boil anymore, which is about as bad. Yesterday I buried a man who liked it. He got to liking it so much he wound up doing it to himself.”

  “Race wouldn’t kill a yellow dog.”

  “I got a man in Denver might not agree. Doc there dug a Buckner bullet out of his chest.”

  “Race wouldn’t do that unless his back was to the wall,” she insisted, “and maybe not even then. I’d believe it of Merle or Jim Shirley before I’d believe it of him.”

  St. John smoked. The sun was a gaping wound over Nebraska.

  She said, “Can you control that posse of yours?” She had told him about George’s visit.

  “Don’t let the Crow’s nasty look throw you,” he said. “He takes orders like Moses on the mountain. Wild Bill’s the same.”

  “What about the Mexicans? I trust them like a bent six-shooter.”

  “You can count on a Mexican as long as you keep paying him.”

  “Or until someone else pays him better.”

  He let that slide.

  “How’d you find out Race ever came here?” she asked then. “The injun send you a telegram?”

  He shook his head. “I asked around. Outlaw on the scout can always count on help from a house of ill fame. You get talked about a lot.” He pulled aside the spread and swung his bare feet to the iron-cold floor, reaching for his long johns. Feeling her eyes on him, he sucked in his stomach as he pulled them on. “You’re mighty damn curious for a woman in your line.”

  “I’m writing a book. You’re Chapter Twelve.” She sounded serious.

  “You’re surrounded! Ditch the iron!”

  The response was slow in coming. George’s command banged among the rocks, gradually losing shape until it staggered out into the empty prairie and died.

  After the Indian’s shot from the cover of the notch, the man riding in front below had either flung himself or been thrown from his saddle as the mount reared, coming down hard on stiff forelegs and arching its back. He rolled when he struck ground and ended up behind a pile of rubble with grass growing out of the spaces between the rocks. The others had followed his lead, one of them—Merle, George guessed—lowering himself more carefully and favoring one leg as he scrambled for the shelter of an indentation in the cliff to his right, carrying his rifle. The other two remained together as they fastened themselves to the opposite wall of the pass. They’d be Jim Shirley and the Cherokee woman.

  A bullet spanged off stone twenty feet to George’s left. He stayed put behind his rock.

  “You got ‘er, friend!” Merle shouted. “Piece at a time!”

  The older Buckner’s voice sounded normal; his echo betrayed the labored pause between sentences. George knocked a piece off the rock Merle was hiding behind. The high thin twang of the ricochet went on forever.

  He wondered how long he could keep them pinned down. If the rest of the posse had started at first light from their last camp as planned, he could expect them in three or four hours. He wished his marksmanship were as good as Wild Bill’s, and given his choice he would have sent Edwards in his place, but if the hard ride through the night was too dangerous for the whole group to attempt, it was certainly so for the half-blind former train robber. The problem was that George had no ammunition for the Winchester beyond what was in the magazine and in his pockets. He had sacrificed his saddlebags for the sake of speed. Thanks to Edwards’ nearly photographic memory of the country, he had managed to beat the Buckners to the Hole just as the sky was turning gray. Without the former’s detailed word map he would still be wandering the grasslands, because this was unfamiliar territory for a Crow born and reared in the Nations.

  A movement behind the grass-grown rubble attracted his attention. Race—yes, it would be Race—was motioning with one hand, attempting to lure his skittish mount near enough to get his hands on the rifle in the saddle scabbard. George chucked one at its feet to frighten it off. The bullet squealed off stone, the horse screamed and folded down onto its side, kicking.

  “Damn!” He fired three more times as Race lunged from behind shelter and came down on the other side of the fallen animal, clutching and sliding the long-barreled rifle out of leather. Two of the shots kicked up dirt. The third struck the horse with a ripe thump. Its head went down and it stopped kicking.

  The Indian had practically dropped the rifle in Race’s lap.

  Zzzeee000! Lead buzzed past George’s ear while he was reloading. It sounded like an enraged wasp. He had heard that noise once before, when a Spanish sharpshooter Comanche Tom had imported from Mallorca had been showing off between performances and fired his Mauser at a tent pole near George, parting it and sending the rope swinging. There was no mistaking that high-powered scream. The Crow was outgunned.

  Zzzeee000! Zzzeee000! He crouched lower, thumbing fresh cartridges into the slot with shaking hands. In the east the sun was nailed in position as securely as he was nailed to that spot. “Indian luck,” he muttered, leveling his carbine across the rock and sighting down the slope.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Shirley

  The pebble was wedged so tightly between the shoe and the hoof that Wild Bill Edwards had to pare away some of the horny growth with his knife and pry with both hands, holding the gray’s fetlock between his knees. He felt a momentary surge of triumph when it popped free, but the emotion quickly changed to disgust when he saw that the hoof was split.

  He released it and straightened. The horse touched down the right forefoot gingerly, snorted, and lifted it again. Edwards scanned the vast empty grassland as if hoping to conjure up a blacksmith and forge. The Mexicans watched him patiently from their saddles, their black Yaqui eyes flat and impenetrable. Not a word had passed between them and their new leader since George’s withdrawal. Edwards spoke no Spanish and communicated when necessary with hand signals. He uncorked
one now, indicating for them to step down and walk their animals. They had passed a ranch five miles back where a fresh mount might be obtained. Would be obtained, he corrected himself. He was a lawman now, which carried certain privileges not unlike those he had enjoyed as an outlaw.

  The sky was a scraped blue against which the sun yellowed and rose, drawing brilliant winking lights out of the new snow not yet twelve hours old. Edwards kept his eyes down, but they began aching after only a few minutes, and by the time the trio came within sight of the ranch house and corral, his head was hammering. He was blinded by darkness and agonized by bright light. That gray half-world between the sun and the stars had become his home, one that grew narrower daily. The future was a nightmare of blackness and dependence. He tried not to think of it, and because he tried, he thought of it most of the time. But he had his guns, and a man didn’t need eyes to find his own head in the dark.

  He located the owner of the spread leaning on his elbows on the corral fence, a lean small gray man with a moustache that tickled his ears and a bony face weathered to match his Stetson and cowhide coat. A pair of young cowpokes stood on the front porch at lazy attention, watching the strangers closely. The rancher kept his eyes on the horses in the corral while Edwards explained his predicament, then splattered tobacco juice at a fence post already glazed with brown liquid and said he had none to spare. Edwards replied that he was sorry it had to be this way and drew on him. The cowpokes were still going for their belt guns when the Mexicans unlimbered their big Colts. A rifle barrel nosed through an open window on the ground floor of the house. Diego snapped off a quick one that splintered the sill. The rifle hit the porch with a clatter and its owner, another young hand, with white-blond hair and a coppery sprouting on his upper lip, threw up his hands. The Menéndezes kept the peace while Edwards entered the corral and transferred his gear from the gray to a white-stockinged roan.

  As the trio left, their late benefactors scrambling to rescue their weapons from the water trough in front of the house, it occurred to Edwards that except for the scribbled receipt he had put in the rancher’s breast pocket, he was doing pretty much the same things in the name of the law that he had been sent to prison for the first time.

  Back in the Nations, Irons St. John had enjoyed the reputation of being the man to get the most good out of a horse short of killing it, and he brought that long-forgotten talent into play now. Ride ten miles, walk five. A man could make a hundred miles a day that way easy, and still have enough horseflesh left to get him out of a tight spot. He didn’t waste time studying the ground or examining broken blades of grass. His tracking skills had never compared with his riding and shooting, and anyway he knew where he was going.

  The key to his manhunting success—a secret he kept to himself—was planning. Preparation was all, and that included poring over all the maps of the territory he was likely to cover during a hunt again and again, branding the details on his memory until he could find his way through it in the dark. Once he had made certain that the Buckners had crossed into Wyoming there was no doubt as to their eventual destination. Even as the thought occurred to him, the various routes by which a rider might reach the Hole-in-the-Wall country sprang to mind in the form of those dotted lines and arrows cartographers found so useful. For all of St. John’s much-vaunted sixth sense, it was less than no help at all without sound groundwork.

  His heart felt fine. Action was his tonic. It was during the quiet periods, when he lost his seat astride his own destiny, that he suffered. With Rawlings on the mend and his quarry’s scent in his nostrils his late depression seemed like something that had befallen someone else. He could kick himself with spurs on every time he thought about how close he had come to turning down the Pinkerton’s offer back in Kansas City. His backside was fit to the saddle, not a stuffed leather chair behind a big desk in some office in Washington. Wolves don’t die dogs.

  He slowed from a canter to a trot. He’d been outrunning his wind and had to alter his pace to breathe. That was all he had to be concerned about at this time in his life, shortness of breath and stiff joints. Doctors were always trying to scare folks. The wise man learned to adjust himself to his new limits, he thought, sucking in great lungfuls of sweet cold air.

  There was only one thing James Blame Shirley hated more than dependence and that was helplessness.

  The day he had awakened in the Cuban field hospital and saw the bandaged stumps where his hands had been, he had smashed a glass cabinet and was fumbling a long, glittering shard between them to slash his throat with when the orderlies had come in. They had wrestled him back into bed, two of them struggling to hold him down while a third fixed the retaining straps in place. After that he had refused to eat. Then a two-hundred-pound corporal had sat on his chest, pinched his nose in one hand, and when the patient opened his mouth to breathe, spooned soup down his throat. Shirley’s fast ended in the face of a threat to repeat the procedure every time he turned down a meal.

  Stateside, the straps were eventually dispensed with. He resigned himself to being cared for, to the extent that he would do nothing for himself, including wipe his backside. This went on for twelve weeks, at the end of which a doctor who was also a full colonel strode into the ward, grasped the patient’s iron bedstead in one corded hand, and pitched its occupant out onto the floor, announcing in a high, thin bray that the taxpayers of the United States had not financed a war against Spanish imperialism to install an oriental potentate in their own midst. Shirley’s discharge followed soon after, following an awards ceremony at which President McKinley presented him personally with the Medal of Honor.

  The event shamed its recipient, still stinging from the colonel’s harsh words. He decided that since it was his hands that were lost and not his feet, he should learn to stand on them. But jobs were scarce for handless veterans. The war was forgotten in less time than it had taken to win, and the Industrial Revolution required workers with all their limbs who could handle tools and machinery. His wound pension struggled for a time against twentieth-century prosperity and inflation, then gave lip. He had no fami1y to whom he could turn for support. He tried to sell his story to a journalist he met in a Brooklyn bar, but the newspaperman told him his editor had a file on the war with Spain thick enough to fill his columns for the next five years had he wanted to do so, which he didn’t. Finally Shirley scraped together enough cash to head West, like so many others who had gone before him in search of opportunity. The opportunity was there, without doubt, but it was slippery and had to be grasped with two hands—if you had them—or it was gone.

  He bought his double-action Colt from a gunsmith in McAlester, Oklahoma Territory, and together they worked out the knotty problem of how to operate it without fingers. The streamlining and the straps were Shirley’s idea. The gunsmith suggested that a coin be fused to the exposed trigger for easy access with his other stump. Shirley provided the gold piece, a good-luck charm from the days when he could expect good luck occasionally. Patiently he taught himself to load and unload the weapon by taking the bullets between his teeth, and spent day after day practicing his marksmanship in the Ouachita Mountains until the gun took the place of the longest index finger a man ever had, returning to the gunsmith’s shop every night for cleaning and oiling.

  That was the part he had resented, his dependence on another for the delicate work. He trusted no one else, which put him on a short tether with McAlester at the center. He had been drunk in a canvas-and-clapboard saloon on the edge of town, grumbling to himself over this state of affairs for the thousandth time, when the tinhorn came in with his Cherokee mistress in tow, the former already less lucid than Shirley, offering the woman in a loud voice to anyone in the place who would stand him to a drink. Shirley was the only taker. Next morning, sober and hung over, the gambler came to the cripple’s campsite looking to take her back. When Shirley refused, his visitor produced a revolver and Shirley blew daylight through him with the Colt.

  The tinho
rn was a stranger to the area. No charges were pressed, on the condition that his killer agreed to leave town and never come back. He did, accompanied by Woman Watching. She took quickly to firearms maintenance and he no longer needed the gunsmith.

  Good fortune had smiled on his first experience with armed robbery. He walked into a Guthrie emporium just as the proprietor was getting ready to take his day’s proceeds to the bank, stuck his gun in the merchant’s face, and walked out with six hundred dollars and change in a locked bag under his arm. This stake got him to Pueblo, Colorado, where he robbed his first bank—an adobe hole with an old green safe inherited from Wells Fargo for a vault—making off with less than two hundred because the bank was about to fold. While escaping he literally ran into Race Buckner, who was on his way in to stick up the same establishment. At that point the bank’s owner, an old cattleman’s clerk who had served part of a term as interim sheriff in another county, came to the door and aimed a revolver at Shirley’s back. Race saw him first and drew his Remington, firing and shattering the threshold at the banker’s feet. The man’s gun went down, his hands went up, and the two desperadoes fled together after relieving him of his watch and gold ring. Woman Watching followed. Merle Buckner’s subsequent release from prison swelled the gang to four and they had been together ever since.

  Now Shirley cursed the mysterious rifleman at the top of the pass. He had never suffered from claustrophobia, but the symptoms were identical, especially in his case because his boundaries at the best of times were narrow. This was worse than the invisible rope that had bound him to the gunsmith in McAlester. Each time he attempted to move along or away from the rock wall, the rifle sneezed smoke, lead twanged off stone near his head or chugged into the gravel at his feet. Even more frustrating was the knowledge that he and his companions were merely objects of sport; the sniper wasn’t out to kill anyone or they’d all be feeding buzzards by now.