Curse of Skull Canyon

by Peter Brandvold

  Lonnie shivered. He’d probably been shivering in his sleep all night. But now he shivered at the passing of a young man he’d grown close to in their short time together as well as at his refreshed knowledge of the nearness of death and of having to deal with it somehow.

  Lonnie got to his feet. The cold made him feel like an old man. When he’d worked the creaks out of his young bones, he ate a couple of pieces of jerky and washed them down with water from his canteen.

  He didn’t bother with a fire. He wanted to get out of the canyon as fast as possible. He felt a cold, hard knot of sadness about McLory, but, frankly, the young Texan’s body tied Lonnie’s nerves in knots.

  He decided that he probably couldn’t get McLory onto his horse. McLory was too heavy for him. He probably could have found a way to get the dead man onto his horse if he’d been less repelled by him. But he chose to tell himself that it would be best for them both if Lonnie left McLory here, discreetly covered by Lonnie’s blankets, while Lonnie fetched the sheriff out from Arapaho Creek.

  He owed it to McLory to tell the sheriff about what had happened here, so that the sheriff could find those four rustlers who’d killed him not to mention who’d tried to kill Lonnie. The sheriff would see to it that McLory was taken to town and given a proper burial.

  Gently, Lonnie eased his saddle out from beneath McLory’s head. He noticed that McLory already appeared to be stiffening. Moving quietly, as though it were possible to wake the dead, Lonnie hauled his gear outside and onto his horse.

  The sun had still not risen when Lonnie rode the General out of the canyon, leaving the dead man alone in the cave behind him. He reflected with dread that he had now spent a full night in the canyon.

  Did that mean he would join McLory soon?

  CHAPTER 8

  Lonnie was glad when he reached Arapaho Creek around noon that day. During the ride, he’d been wary of being run down again by the same men who’d run him down the day before.

  Now as he rode into the bustling mining camp and ranch supply hamlet lying in a shallow valley in the southernmost reaches of the Never Summer range, he continued to look around cautiously. There was a good chance the men who’d ambushed him—likely, the same men who’d killed McLory—had come to town.

  Lonnie felt safer here than he had in the mountains, but he was not yet out of the woods.

  He headed directly for the sheriff’s office. As he trotted the General along the street, Arapaho Street, which occasionally snugged itself up against the creek running through the heart of town, he weaved through the steady traffic of pedestrians and ranch and mining supply wagons and around the occasional bearded prospector and his pick-and-shovel-laden donkey or mule.

  The mercantile was coming up on the right side of the street. That was where Lonnie’s girl, Casey Stoveville, worked.

  As Lonnie always did when he came to town, he scouted the place, hoping for a glimpse of Casey. He didn’t have to look hard today. She was sitting out on the front steps running up to the mercantile’s broad front porch and loading dock. Casey wasn’t alone. She was sitting next to a man in a store-bought three-piece suit and bowler hat.

  The gent had a handsome face though his nose was a little short. Dark-brown hair curled onto his celluloid shirt collar. He sported a neatly trimmed goatee and watch chain. Likely a drummer of one sort or another. Salesmen often swarmed the mercantile, imploring the proprietor, Mr. Hendrickson, to stock his shelves with their company’s goods.

  Mr. Hendrickson was probably out to lunch at the moment. That was likely why the drummer was talking with Casey, who often ran the place for Hendrickson and who knew how to do nearly everything that Hendrickson himself did. But, then, as Lonnie started moving on past the mercantile, raising his hand to wave if Casey caught his gaze, Lonnie frowned uncertainly.

  There was something about the man sitting with Casey that made Lonnie doubt that he was a drummer, after all. One, he didn’t appear to have a sample kit with him. Two, his suit appeared of a better cut than your usual salesman. And it appeared fairly new. Drummers didn’t usually earn enough for a new suit of fine quality.

  Also, this gent—who appeared to be in maybe his mid twenties—didn’t look hungry or desperate enough to be a drummer. In Lonnie’s limited experience, salesmen were usually the slick, syrupy-eyed, wolfish sort.

  But that wasn’t all that Lonnie noted about him. This fellow was sitting so close to Casey on the step that their legs were nearly touching, and he was giving Casey his full attention as he talked, smiling in a groveling way. He seemed to be keeping his voice low, so that no one else could hear. It was an intimate conversation.

  Casey sat leaning forward, elbows on her knees, her head turned toward the man beside her, one finger twisting up a long lock of her dark-blonde hair as she sat listening to him, rapt.

  Lonnie’s gut twisted a little behind his belt buckle. Was this fancy Dan sparking Casey?

  The General pulled up sharply and gave an indignant whinny.

  “Hey, watch where you’re goin’, young fella!”

  Lonnie whipped his head forward to see a freckle-faced, potbellied man in a soiled bar apron glaring at him. Standing ahead and to one side, the man was holding an armload of firewood.

  “This time o’ day the street’s too damn busy to be ridin’ through town with your head in the clouds, boyo!” The barman spoke with a thick Irish accent.

  A man coming up on Lonnie in a buckboard ranch wagon, chuckled and shook his head in mockery. The barman, whom Lonnie recognized as Paddy O’Ryan, who ran a shack out of which he sold tin buckets of beer and ran a couple of whores’ cribs out back, gave Lonnie one more venomous glare, and said, “You damn near ran me down!”

  Then he swung around and, shaking his head, stomped through the open door of his low-slung shop.

  Holding the General’s reins taut in his gloved hands, Lonnie glanced at Casey and the suited gentleman, who were behind him now, as he’d ridden on past the mercantile. Casey and the fancy Dan were still talking back and forth, smiling and occasionally laughing, so involved in their conversation that neither one seemed to have noticed Lonnie despite Paddy O’Ryan’s loud harangue.

  Lonnie had never really known jealousy before. But he knew it now. It was an ache down deep inside him. It was like an injury though no bones or muscles were involved.

  He rode on. He had more important business to take care of at the moment, though his aching gut felt otherwise. He glanced back over his shoulder once more. The fancy Dan and Casey were still chinning as though they’d known each other for years.

  Maybe they had. Maybe they were just friends.

  Something told Lonnie that wasn’t true. Something told him the fancy Dan wanted to be more than friends with Casey. Lonnie had sort of half consciously been worried about that sort of thing. Casey had filled out nicely in the last year, and she’d acquired a certain mature, self-confident sparkle in her eye that meant she was growing up and getting even prettier than she had been before.

  She was becoming a young woman, which somehow didn’t seem fair to Lonnie, who was still two years younger. At fourteen, he was still a kid. In the worst way, he wanted to catch up to her, to be her equal.

  Lonnie managed to sweep the confounding problem aside for the moment, but not before reflecting briefly on the story that McLory had told him the night before, about McLory’s girl spurning him in favor of a gent who’d made more money than he had.

  That girl, that heartbreak, had been the last thought, the last image in the young Texan’s mind before he’d died.

  Lonnie drew up to the sheriff’s office, a log cabin supported on low stone pylons near the county courthouse on a side street behind it. Smoke issued from the tin chimney pipe to sweep down low over the porch, rife with the sweet tang of pine.

  Two men wearing deputy sheriff badges were lounging on the front porch. Lonnie recognized them, for he recognized most folks in the town as well as around the county, having grown up here and also b
eing curious and observant in the way that boys often are, learning the ways of things.

  Lonnie dropped down out of the saddle and tied the General’s reins to the hitch rack. As he mounted the front stoop, one of the sheriff’s two deputies, Chick Bohannon, said, “Well, look what we have here. Mister Big Britches his own self!”

  The other deputy, Randall “Walleye” Miller, laughed as he sat back in his timber-framed, hide-bottom chair, sipping a cup of coffee likely laced with whiskey. It was said that Miller, who’d been fired from several mines in the area, had a problem with who-hit-John. Miller was a big man with a thick, curly beard and one wandering, red-rimmed eye. He had a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun resting across his fat thighs clad in greasy, torn denim trousers.

  “You find any more money out in them mountains, Mister Big Britches?” Bohannon asked, referring to the money that Lonnie and Casey had taken over the mountains and delivered to the deputy US marshal in Camp Collins.

  The tall, slender man’s tone was fairly dripping with sarcasm. Bohannon’s lilac eyes were flat and malicious, and he had long, coarse, yellow hair streaked with mud brown.

  Lonnie knew from the way he’d been glared at and spoken to in town over the past year that some folks around here still thought, as had originally been suspected, that he’d been part of Shannon Dupree’s holdup gang. He wasn’t sure how they coupled that notion to the fact that he and Casey had returned the stolen bank money to the rightful authorities.

  Lonnie had inadvertently shot one of the sheriff’s deputies who’d ambushed him in the mountains. That deputy had been a well-liked man in this area. Lonnie suspected that that was a big reason why it had been hard to change some folks’ minds on the subject of Lonnie’s part in the initial robbery.

  That and the fact that Dupree had been making time with Lonnie’s mother, earning not only May Gentry a bad reputation hereabouts, but earning her innocent son a bad reputation, as well.

  “Nope, no money today,” Lonnie said, trying to keep his tone jovial. “Sheriff Halliday in?”

  “What you want him for?” asked Deputy Miller with a suspicious, self-important air, narrowing that odd, wandering eye of his. “The sheriff’s too busy to be bothered by the offspring of mountain scrubs.”

  Lonnie drew a sharp breath, trying to calm himself but finding himself balling his fists at his sides. “My family ain’t scrubs, Deputy Miller.”

  Walleye, who’d been tilted back in his chair, set the chair down with a dull thud, and flared his nostrils at Lonnie.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I say you are. What’re you gonna do about it?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Deputy Miller slowly gained his feet, his dung-brown eyes riveted on Lonnie though the wandering one rolled slightly to the outside of its socket. The man’s swollen nostrils and thick neck gave him the aspect of an angry Brahma bull. Long, grizzled dark hair liberally woven with strands of gray hung down from his slouch hat.

  Walleye moved toward Lonnie and stopped. “I asked you a question, Gentry.”

  Lonnie couldn’t believe this. He’d done nothing to provoke this man. He tried not to let his exasperation show as he said, “I’m just lookin’ for Sheriff Halliday. That’s all. I ain’t lookin’ for no trouble.”

  “You Gentrys is always lookin’ for trouble. Your pa was a troublemaker, too. An uppity troublemakin’ Yankee.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Lonnie’s dim memories of his father were of a gentle, good-natured man. The problem was that for some reason or another, Southerners, some of them ex-Rebels from the Old South, outnumbered Yankees in and around the Never Summer Range.

  The lingering differences between the two sides often boiled over in hop houses and whiskey saloons—usually after sundown. Lonnie had heard that his father, a well-liked man with many friends and also a decorated war veteran, had occasionally visited the saloons here in Arapaho Creek, and he’d no doubt been involved in a skirmish or two over the lingering disagreements. From what Lonnie had heard about his father, Calvin Gentry had been a man who’d stood up for his principles.

  Apparently, Walleye had been involved in one or two of these likely busthead-induced dustups, as well.

  Walleye shoved his shotgun out toward Deputy Bohannon, who took it with a laugh and leaned back against the office’s front wall. “You callin’ me a liar, Gentry?” Walleye asked.

  “Whoa, now,” Lonnie said, holding up his hands, palms out. “No one called no one a liar. I don’t want no trouble, Deputy Miller. I’m just here to . . .”

  “How’s your momma doin’?”

  Walleye’s question surprised Lonnie. He stared up at the big man towering over him. Walleye stood on the porch while Lonnie stood on the middle step leading up to it, a hand on each rail. He didn’t like the dark, glowering cast to the big man’s eyes coupled, as it had been, with the mention of Lonnie’s mother.

  “What’s that?”

  “I asked you how your momma’s doin. A purty gal like that, livin’ out there all alone with a scrappy shaver to look after, and with her outlaw boyfriend dead . . . she must get lonely.”

  Again, Bohannon laughed. Louder this time. He said, “I heard she gave birth to Dupree’s child, to boot!”

  Walleye said, “You tell your momma, boy Gentry, that if she gets too lonely, I’m right here. She can come knockin’ on my door—”

  “Shut up!” The words were out of Lonnie’s mouth before he knew it. His ears were burning with sudden fury.

  Walleye lurched forward, jaws hard. “What’d you say to me, boy?”

  “I told you to shut up, you fat son of a bitch!”

  Lonnie was suddenly so riled that his innate common sense slithered out his ears. He was ready to fight this big, gutter-brained peckerwood, never mind that the man outweighed him by close to two hundred pounds and was nearly twice as tall as Lonnie. As Walleye started down the steps, Lonnie tried to hold his ground, but Walleye lunged like a cat, snatching him up in his arms, and, fight as he might, there was little that Lonnie could do.

  Within seconds, Lonnie found himself upside down. His hat went tumbling off his head. Walleye was holding Lonnie by his ankles and jerking him up and down, so that the ground came up so close to Lonnie’s face that Lonnie could see every rock, pebble, strand of hay, and fleck of horse manure.

  Walleye jerked Lonnie down sharply.

  The ground came up to slam the top of Lonnie’s head, stunning the boy. His arms fell slack, hands in the dirt. Then Walleye carried Lonnie over to the stock trough behind the hitch rack. He raised Lonnie up and over the hay-flecked trough and then lowered him. Before Lonnie could suck a complete breath, his head was plunged into the trough, cold water engulfing his head and seeping into his ears.

  Lonnie’s heart was a drum beating away in his ears as the water rushed in to make the drumming even louder.

  Lonnie sucked water into his lungs. He convulsed, blowing bubbles around his head as he thrashed his arms and kicked his legs, trying to free himself of the burly Walleye. Just when Lonnie thought his head would explode, Walleye lifted him out of the trough but dangled him in the air above it, his head about three inches above the water.

  The General was whinnying and stomping his front hooves, threatening Walleye from the other side of the hitch rack. Walleye was hugging Lonnie’s knees hard against his chest.

  Walleye glared at the General, and yelled, “Shut up, you mangy cayuse, or I’ll put a bullet in you!” He looked down at Lonnie, who continued to thrash while coughing water up out of his battered lungs. “You ready to say you’re sorry, boy?” Lonnie’s nose and eyes were on fire.

  He looked up at the big man towering over him, and clenched his fists. “You go to hell, you big son of a—!”

  Before Lonnie could finish his sentence, Walleye plunged Lonnie’s head into the trough once more. Again, Lonnie inhaled water. He strangled, thrashing, his head swelling, his heart hammering like an Apache war drum in his ears. When he didn’t think he could go another
half second without a breath, his head growing so light he thought he was about to pass out, Walleye lifted him clear of the trough once more.

  Above the General’s enraged whinnying and hoof stomping, Walleye said, “How ’bout now, boy? If not, you’re gonna—”

  “Turn him loose, Miller.”

  Lonnie had only vaguely heard the voice above the General’s caterwauling and his own strangling sounds. Then he saw Frank Halliday step out onto the porch and move up to stand beside Chick Bohannon, fingers in the pockets of his brown wool vest, which he wore beneath a black, claw hammer frock coat. His shiny, five-pointed sheriff’s star was pinned to the lapel of his coat—up high where everybody could see it.

  Pursing his lips, looking like a schoolmaster only mildly annoyed with the current bout of playground roughhousing, Halliday said, “Put him down.”

  “Whatever you say, Sheriff.”

  Grinning, Walleye released Lonnie’s legs. Lonnie dropped straight down and head first into the trough. His head struck the bottom of the trough, and then his legs splashed into the water, as well.

  He grabbed the trough’s wooden sides and heaved himself up and out of the water, strangling as he tried to rid his lungs of water while also trying to draw a breath, to keep from passing out. As the sunlit street grew dim around him, Lonnie crawled over the side of the trough, and dropped into the street. He rolled onto his belly and then rose onto his hands and knees, convulsing violently as he fought away the cold, wet hands of what felt like certain death.

  As he did, he could feel the General’s hot breath against the back of his neck and the occasional, concerned touch of the buckskin’s prickly, rubbery snout.

  “What’s this all about?” Frank Halliday wanted to know.

  “The kid comes waltzin’ up here, bein’ a smart Mcgee, Sheriff,” said Chick Bohannon. “You know the Gentrys. Him an’ his ma think they’re really somethin’, when all May Gentry is is a Jane-about-the-mountains.”

  “Prob’ly shackin’ up with another outlaw,” said Walleye.