“Ah,” he said. “I already did. So what are you going to do?”
“Don’t push me.”
Larose stretched his nostrils as he gave a small wave of his gun hand. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Quick as a cat, Dunbar moved forward and grabbed Larose by the front of his shirt. He lifted Larose so that only the toes of the long boots touched the ground, and he slapped him back and forth on the face. In another instant, he grabbed the shirt with his other hand as well, jerked Larose off his feet and into a sideways position, and slammed him to the ground.
Larose pushed himself to his feet. Rubbing his chin, he said, “That’s the last time you’ll ever do that.” He made as if he was going to turn away, but he whipped back around with his pistol in his hand. As he was cocking the hammer, Dunbar had his own gun out and fired.
Commotion burst out in the corral behind as the steers spooked. Larose pressed his hand to the spot where his ribs and chest met. Blood appeared between his fingers as he backed up one, two, three steps and fell against the corral planks.
The crowd scattered. Dunbar had Ainsworth and Crowley covered with his pistol. Ainsworth carried a gun, but Crowley, as usual, did not. “Let’s finish our conversation,” Dunbar said.
Jimmy Delf had run for cover in the direction of the hotel, but Mrs. Deville and I followed him and persuaded him to come back. We marched him toward Dunbar, passing Otto and Carl and the proprietor of the mercantile whose name at the moment I could not remember. Lou Foster was standing by as we came up to the spot where Dunbar was faced off against Ainsworth and Crowley.
Dunbar put his gun in his holster. “Tell us your name again.”
The thin man’s voice was shaky as he said, “Jimmy Delf.”
“Very good. Now, Jimmy, can you tell us if you’ve ever seen this man before?”
Jimmy stammered with a series of buh, buh, buh until he came out with, “Yes.”
“Can you tell us where?”
“On Old Woman Creek. About fifteen years ago.” Jimmy wet his lips and made the buh-buh-buh sound again. He took in a short breath and said, “He-uh-killed my partner, Lunn Woodfill.”
A rumble of voices traveled through the crowd, which had drawn closer to listen.
Crowley glared at Jimmy Delf. “That’s a lie.”
“It’s, it’s the truth.”
The crowd held its collective breath.
Dick Ainsworth stepped forward, hand near his gun, and said, “Did you call this man a liar?”
Dunbar said, “Yes, he did. And I stand behind it.”
Ainsworth squared around. “What do you have to do with any of this, anyway?” He bored at Dunbar with his dark blue eyes.
“We could ask the same of you, but I doubt you’d tell us the answer.”
Ainsworth’s face hardened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m guessing that you didn’t know why Borden Crowley had you do in Alex Garrison. But he hired you to do it, and you did what you were paid to do.”
“Oh, you’re out of your mind.”
“He was afraid Alex Garrison was onto him, and he was right. But he didn’t have the nerve to kill another man himself, so he found someone who didn’t have any scruples.”
“You don’t make any more sense than this old bag here.”
Verona’s small, gray agate eyes peered out from her cloudy face.
Ainsworth was better than I had given him credit for. While everyone’s attention was turned on Dunbar and Verona, Ainsworth drew his gun as he stepped to the side to get a clear shot at Jimmy Delf.
Dunbar whirled and lunged. He raised his hand in the shape of a fin and brought it down like a cleaver on Ainsworth’s wrist. The gun fired, and a spurt of sand jumped up a yard away from me. Ainsworth dropped the pistol but brought around his left fist to hit Dunbar. The punch bounced off of Dunbar’s shoulder, and the two of them grappled to see which one could lock the other in his arms.
Ainsworth fought like a badger, vicious and relentless. He punched and gouged and kicked, and I believe he would have bitten an ear or a finger if he could. Dunbar fought for control rather than to do damage. After the two of them hit the ground once and came back to their feet, Dunbar settled his grip around Ainsworth’s midsection. He raised the man higher than he had lifted Larose, gave a hoist with his hip, and flung the man to the ground. This time, he followed the body, put a knee in the back of Ainsworth’s armpit, and held his arm for leverage.
“Now you can make your choice,” said Dunbar. “You can hold still, or you can have your arm popped out of joint.”
Ainsworth was breathing hard, raising tiny clouds of dust. “Go to hell,” he said.
Dunbar pushed with his knee, and the man flattened. “I would say the same to you, but you’re not going anywhere. And I’ll let these people know why. Crowley hired you to kill Alex Garrison because he didn’t have the nerve to do it himself. The only hitch was that Bill Pearson saw you in the neighborhood. So you went away. When Crowley thought enough time had passed, he brought you back. But Bill Pearson recognized you, so you had to do him in. Then when other people seemed to know too much, you silenced them as well. George Hodel the traveling drunk and Mary Weldon the innkeeper.” Dunbar applied a little more weight with his knee, then turned his head and said, “Bard, pick up his gun and hang onto it. And now that I think of it, get the other one as well.”
I took a couple of steps, leaned over, and picked up Ainsworth’s pistol. As I rose to locate Boots Larose’s body, which had been lying in the background, I saw Borden Crowley taking uncertain steps toward Dunbar and Ainsworth. He held Larose’s yellow-handled revolver with both hands.
I heard myself say, “Hold it right there. Drop it.” I had him covered with Ainsworth’s pistol.
Crowley dropped the gun.
Dunbar had been distracted enough, however, that Ainsworth was able to twist and buck free. He rolled to one side and reached for the revolver that Crowley had dropped. Dunbar rose up and stepped on Ainsworth’s hand but could not stop him from grasping the pistol. Dunbar stepped on the man’s wrist, then bent over and pulled at the wrist with both hands. Ainsworth squeezed off a shot that buried a bullet with a spang! into a corral plank.
Ainsworth rose to his knees, both hands on the pistol, as Dunbar continued to try to control the wrist of the hand that held the gun. Ainsworth rose halfway to his feet, and Dunbar twisted the wrist. The shorter man turned, and the two of them hit the ground again. A gunshot fired, muffled, sounding something like a shot fired down into a prairie dog hole.
Dunbar rolled over and pushed himself onto his knees. Ainsworth lolled on his back, and a wet stain showed on his dark blue shirt.
Dunbar stood up. I still held Crowley at gunpoint, though I do not know what I would have done if he had challenged me.
“And now you,” said Dunbar.
Crowley had a strange expression about him, darkened by the gathering dusk. On one hand, he seemed to recognize not only that his jig was up but that someone had come for him. On the other, he seemed to hold on to the attitude that people below him had no right to bring him to account.
To Dunbar he said, “You can’t do things like this and get away with it.”
Dunbar frowned. “Let’s not get off track. You still haven’t answered to what happened on Old Woman Creek, not to mention what happened later.”
“Nothing happened. It’s all a lie.” With contempt on his face, Crowley turned to Jimmy Delf. “I don’t know what this guttersnipe hopes to gain by it.”
I was struck with the realization that Crowley was answering to what happened on Old Woman Creek, even if he was lying.
Dunbar held his eyes on Crowley, who averted his. Dunbar said, “You know he’s telling the truth. Your old secret is out. This is your reckoning.”
Crowley’s eyes widened, and as he looked around, I could feel the eyes of the townspeople, the cowhands, and the other ranch owners all fixed on this center of the stage. Crow
ley’s eyes moved over the crowd again, and though he seemed immobilized, somewhere in his mind, a cog or wheel moved. With the town looking on, he broke and ran.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It made no sense. Here was a man at his last ditch with nowhere to go. The end was inevitable. And yet he ran.
He turned and dashed for the main gate of the corrals. Throwing the wooden latch, he ran into the alleyway and left the gate open. Half the crowd saw him as he ran to a saddled horse that was tied by a neck rope. I thought he would try to get away on the horse, but he held his hand against the front of its chest as he looked on both sides. It occurred to me that he was looking for a rifle. Not finding one, he untied the catch rope from the side of the saddle and hurried on with the coiled rope in his hand.
With Dunbar in pursuit, he ran to the cross alley, opened and latched the gates, and ran further into the maze. I thought, he had to know he was doomed. How much time did he think he could buy? Even if he could overcome Dunbar, which I doubted, or escape him and leave the corrals behind, where was he going to run? He would be a man alone, on foot, in the middle of a thousand miles of grassland.
Yet he ran. From time to time I saw his silver-gray hat bobbing above the corral planks, which no longer shone in the sunlight. Not far behind, I saw Dunbar’s black hat marking his progress. The chase had an unreal or fantastic quality to it as the two men, the dull corral planks, and the shifting forms of cattle became less distinct with the onset of dusk.
I do not think anyone left the crowd. Mrs. Deville and Verona and Jimmy Delf stood together, as did the small groups of townsfolk and workmen. Carl Granger had climbed up the outer corral planks to gain a better view, and Otto Trent stood on the ground nearby.
Now the light-colored hat came into clearer view. Crowley was climbing the steps of the catwalk.
I thought, how foolish could he be? He was going to a more difficult place to escape from—an easier place to be trapped and not be able to string out his time any longer. Then it occurred to me that he was looking over the layout, planning an escape—again, a pointless escape, for even if he made it to a gate in the rear, he would have no place to go. All he would find would be a set of train tracks and an empty landscape.
Dunbar clattered up the steps behind him. Crowley moved at a fast walk. Dunbar ran. Crowley stopped and turned, then slapped at his pursuer with the coils of the rope.
I knew it hurt. I had slapped at massive, muscle-bound, immovable bulls with a rope like that, and the bull would flinch.
Dunbar put up his hand, caught hold of the rope, and pulled it away from Crowley. The tall man grabbed at the rope to try to take it back, but Dunbar yanked it and kept possession. Crowley turned and ran again.
Dunbar’s bootheels sounded on the planks as he took up the chase. He had the coils in his left hand and was swinging the rope with his right.
He’s going to catch him, I thought. He’ll bring him back alive.
Crowley reached the end of the catwalk. He must have planned his route, for he began to climb over the railing. Someone like Boots Larose would have vaulted over the edge and dropped the eight or nine feet to the ground below, but Crowley was not young and supple. He raised his leg, saw that he could not swing his leg over the railing, and repositioned himself.
Dunbar made his toss from fifteen feet away as Crowley swung his leg over and straddled the railing. The loop settled over his shoulders. Holding onto the board with his left hand, he worked his right thumb under the rope and pushed it up over his shoulder. As he did so, his hat fell away.
Dunbar was pulling slack and setting his heels. Crowley tottered as he tried to lift the rope higher. Dunbar shook out slack, the way a cowpuncher does to settle the rope over a calf’s nose and onto its neck, except that Dunbar was trying to drop the rope back down around Crowley’s upper arms. The loss of tension on the rope caused Crowley to totter again. The catwalk was high enough, and the rail even higher, that I was able to see him hover and slip.
His right leg pointed straight down, resting on nothing, and his left leg kicked for a plank to grab onto. There was no plank, just the railing. He tried to hook his leg on that lone two-byfour, but his balance was too far off.
Dunbar must have thought he had the rope lower, for he pulled the slack and leaned back as Crowley tumbled over. The rope tightened around his neck, and his fall stopped just before his feet could touch the ground.
Years later, I would come upon a man who had hanged himself from a trestle. When I did, I recalled this image that stayed with me of a man suspended for a few seconds in the dusk until he tumbled on the ground.
Del Bancroft came to visit us at the chuck wagon the next morning. Dan and the night wrangler had set camp in the same spot as when we were building the corrals, and Dunbar and I had pitched our tent as before. Some of the other cowhands had camped out as well, including George and Bob, while others had taken rooms or gone back to their ranches. Only a couple of other hands were stirring when Del poured a cup of coffee and sat down next to Dunbar and me.
Other than the background noise of livestock grunting and bumping in the corrals, the predawn morning at the edge of town was still and quiet. Del had a fresh air about him, with the scent of bath soap, and I saw the neat, clean edges where he had trimmed around his beard.
“We’ll be goin’ home in a little while,” he said. “Don’t know when I’ll see you again.”
Dunbar said, “I expect to pull out in a day or two.”
“I’ll be around,” I said.
“We’re planning to go to Lincoln. Be gone about two weeks.”
Dunbar and I nodded.
After a sip of coffee, Del directed his attention to Dunbar. “Thinkin’ I might not see you again, I thought I might ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“How did you know about Jimmy Delf?”
Dunbar raised his eyebrows and drew in a breath. “Well, I had been following this case for a while, along with a few others. Gathering information as I could. I was able to track him down where he was living in town called Corinth in Illinois. After I spoke with him, I thought his story was believable, so I came here to put things together.”
“To find out the truth. Well, I’m glad you did. You must be some kind of an investigator, then. Maybe a Pinkerton man?”
“I work on my own.”
Del nodded as he registered the information. “It’s too bad about Crowley.”
“In what way?” Dunbar had an open expression on his face, as if the comment were a point of philosophical interest.
“I would like to have seen him brought before a court of law. And I assume that’s what you were attempting.”
“It was.”
Del gave a mild shrug. “There’s no way of changing it. As for Larose, there was no way around how that ended.”
“Not that I could see.”
Del paused and gazed at the fire. “I don’t know what to make of him. He wasn’t in on it from the beginning, that’s for sure. It goes too far back.”
“True. I think he came into the game late and didn’t realize what he was getting into. I think he was trying to prove himself so he could move up and have a position above the others. Still, he bought into the game and took cards. Pulling a gun on another man is serious business, so my guess is that he helped Ainsworth with the two jobs in town. He had something to protect.”
“That makes sense. I had known him for a while, and I was surprised to see how thick he was becoming with Ainsworth. Now him, I never much cared for. But he was someone else’s hired man, so I tried not to pay him much attention. As for Crowley, that just goes to show that you can know someone for years and not know at all what’s at the bottom. Lookin’ back, I can’t say I ever knew him. He had skeletons in the closet all that time.”
Del’s wording reminded me of something Dunbar had said one day after we had stopped by Blue Wolf Spring. Hidden bodies, or secret crimes, were like people who fell into glaciers— always t
here.
Dunbar pursed his lips, and his mustache bushed up. “Like they say in the old poems, ‘murder will out.’ You’d like to think it’s a dependable truth, but it doesn’t happen as often as it should. Too many people still get away with it.”
“Well, he didn’t.”
“You can see now that it weighed on him. Even after having Alex Garrison killed, he had the shack burned down. My guess is that he was afraid there might be some kind of a written statement tucked away. Then he felt that Bill Pearson posed too much of a threat. After that, killing George Hodel was unnecessary, but the man had come down from the north, and from all his comments about where he had been and what he’d seen, Crowley must have thought he had heard something about the incident on Old Woman Creek. It made Crowley desperate.”
Del stared at the fire for a few seconds, as if he was putting things together. “I said I had a question, and you’ve answered two at least. I hope you don’t mind if I ask a third.”
“No harm.”
“What about Mrs. Deville? How does she happen to take part in this?”
“She offered to help.”
“Is she some kind of a detective?”
“No, she’s been in the restaurant business, as she said.”
“But you are.”
“I’m a cowpuncher.”
Del smiled. “I knew that.” He turned to me. “Tag, I was wondering if you could look after our place while we’re gone.”
“I suppose I could. I think my work is just about up with Lou Foster.”
“Good. We’ll be leaving in three days. If you can come by on Thursday, I’ll show you what to do.”
He stood up, and I did likewise. We shook hands.
Dunbar stood up as well. As he shook hands with Del Bancroft, he said, “Have a safe trip. It’s been good to work with you.”
“Yes, it has. If you ever come back through, drop by and see us.”
“I might. I’d like to see that stagecoach when you’ve got it turned out.”
Dusk Along the Niobrara Page 18
