Nightfall at Little Aces

by Ralph Cotton

  Clay had heard mention of the woman, and he knew which woman Barnes referred to. He had heard Wills’ horse leave moments ago, then heard it ride back a shorter distance—he knew where the young cowboy had been, and he’d also heard him leave. “Are we all set?” Clay asked, his face showing no expression, his cloudy blind eyes hidden behind a pair of dark-shaded spectacles.

  “Yeah, I’m ready when you are,” said Lindley.

  Clay put away his concern for Emma Vertrees and patted his hands gently on the parts of the Remington, getting a feel for their location. “Somebody say go,” he said bluntly, his hands going back to the tabletop, relaxed yet poised.

  Lindley grinned. “Just like that? You don’t want them to say, Get ready, get set first?”

  “If you need them to, they can,” Clay said respectfully.

  “No, I don’t need for them to. I’m ready.” The smile had left Lindley’s face as he heard Rupert and Barnes stifle a laugh. With his eyes fixed on the blind man’s face, Lindley said, “Barnes, say go for us.”

  Barnes stalled. “It don’t seem natural, just saying go, without no warning or nothing else.”

  “Just say it, dang it to hell!” Lindley growled at him. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “All right,” said Barnes. A tense silence loomed for a second, until he said loudly, “Go!”

  Clay’s black hands worked deftly, almost in a blur, snatching piece after piece of the Remington from the tabletop and fitting them into place. Across from him Hank Lindley did the same. He worked fast, but not fast enough. Before his Colt had been half assembled, he heard the spin of the big Remington’s cylinder and heard Rupert say in awe, “Damn! He’s done!”

  Lindley let the cylinder to his Colt fall back onto the tabletop in defeat. He stared at the Remington looming before him in Clay’s hand and said, “This is rigged. Nobody is that fast putting a gun together.”

  “Rigged? Rigged how?” Rupert asked. “You seen it with your own eyes. How could you rig something like this?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s rigged, I’m telling you.” As Lindley spoke, Clay heard the rustle of his shirtsleeve and the slightest jingle of coins as he reached over, picked up the five dollars in bills and coins, and set the money in front of him. “But I’ve never craw-fished on a bet,” Lindley added in disgust.

  Relieved, Clay touched the money lightly with his fingertips, counting without giving the appearance of counting. “How close did you get?” he asked quietly. “I never heard your cylinder click.”

  “Not very danged close,” Rupert laughed. He rubbed his finger and thumb together toward Lindley, reminding him of the dollar bet he’d made. His laughter was cut short as Lindley snatched a dollar from his shirt pocket and tossed it at him.

  “Never mind how close I got,” Lindley said grudgingly. “I’ll be coming back. I’m going to try you again.”

  “I’m always here and you’re always welcome,” Clay said respectfully. This was what many of them said after he’d won their money. I’m coming back….But they never did.

  He sat silently as Lindley finished assembling his Colt, and then as the three cowboys mounted their horses and rode away toward the dirt street. When the dust had settled and he could no longer feel the gritty dryness of it in his nostrils, Clay stood up, shoved the Remington down into his waist behind his shirttail, and picked up the tall hickory walking stick leaning against the table.

  “Come on out here, Little Dog,” he said to a growth of weeds and debris on the other side of the alley. “Take me on over to the widow woman’s fence. We best go see about her.”

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack had been tracking the Wheelers and their unknown accomplice for over a week when the three crossed over into New Mexico Territory. The Wheelers, Eddie and Dorsen, were not particularly smart, but they had the animal cunning that came with being lifelong criminals. They might not know that it was the ranger on their trail, but they knew instinctively that someone had taken up the chase. They were used to being hunted. Sam knew that slipping around by the skin of their necks came natural to them.

  He’d been tracking three sets of prints ever since he got word of the killing of the sheriff in Whitehead. Two days into the hunt, a relay station attendant outside Peyton finally identified the two Wheeler brothers. The third man? He’d shrugged and said he had no idea. “But it was the Wheelers for dang sure,” he’d said, holding a wet rag to the knot Dorsen Wheeler had left along the side of his head—his only payment for the three horses they’d taken from his corral.

  After a week of tracking and gaining little ground, the ranger decided to play a hunch. He’d decided that if he were the Wheelers and headed in this direction rather than toward the Mexican border, his destination would be up into the Santo De Christo Mountains. He knew the Wheelers were Kansas boys and that sooner or later they would head there, but not straightaway. They needed to cool off first, Sam told himself.

  Following his hunch, he’d spent the night riding his Appaloosa stallion, Black Pot, up a dark treacherous set of switchbacks. At first light, he sat under the branches of a sheltering pine, looking down onto stretches of woods broken up by grassy flatlands, seeing what those woods had to offer. If his hunch was wrong, he’d pick up the trail again, but it would cost him a day’s ride without rest. Still, it was worth the gamble, he told himself—Bring this hunt to an end.

  He’d decided to give himself only a few more minutes before scrapping his idea and picking up their trail once again. But no sooner had the thought entered his mind than he spotted the three men riding into sight from a stand of woodlands.

  “Speak of the devil,” he murmured to the stallion as the three riders slipped into sight above a rise of flatlands. He backed the horse a step even though the darkness beneath the big pine offered plenty of cover. Raising a battered field lens to his right eye, he homed in for a closer look. Yep, Eddie and Dorsen Wheeler all right… Now, moving the lens away from the Wheeler brothers’ faces to the third man, he said quietly in surprise, “Warren Beck…?”

  Sam lowered the lens from his face and looked down with his naked eyes. “Memphis Warren Beck, I never figured a seasoned ole train robber like you to partner up with the likes of these two knot heads,” he said under his breath.

  Sam watched the three riders slip along warily toward the next cover of woodlands a thousand yards away. The Wheelers kept looking back over their shoulders, checking their back trail, but Memphis Beck stared straight ahead—a man with either nothing to fear, nothing to lose, or nothing to hide….

  We’ll see, the ranger told himself. Knowing that his hunch had paid off, he collapsed the lens between his gloved hands, shoved it inside his riding duster, and turned the stallion back to the narrow trail leading along the mountainside.

  Once across the wide stretch of grasslands and back inside the shelter of towering pine and spruce, Dorsen Wheeler slowed his horse from beside his brother and sidled up to Memphis Beck riding behind them. “I expect we can breathe a little easier, now that we’re out of the open.”

  Beck only turned a look to him. “Who’s breathing hard?”

  Dorsen looked a little embarrassed and said, “You know what I mean, though.”

  “Yeah,” said Beck, “I know what you mean.” He looked away.

  Dorsen gigged his horse back up beside his brother and rode on in silence. His brother Eddie spat a stream of tobacco juice, shook his head slightly, and chuckled under his breath. “You have no winning ways about you, brother Dor. I always said so.”

  Dorsen offered no reply, but two miles deeper into the woodlands as the three stopped their horses alongside a wide shallow creek, he tried again. “I can’t help but wonder, Memphis, what it’s like up there with them ole boys in the Hole. An old hoss like you must’ve seen a lot of—”

  “You’ll have to go see for yourself,” Memphis Beck replied quietly but rudely, cutting him off.

  Again Eddie c
huckled; again Dorsen’s face reddened, this time with anger as much as embarrassment. “Are you being sharp with me, Memphis?” he asked. Standing beside his horse as it watered itself, he poised his hand near his holstered Colt. “Because I’m not known to take much guff or abuse off of any man.”

  Memphis’ hand made no effort to draw itself any closer to the big bone-handled Dance Brothers pistol lying straight across his chest in a slim-jim holster. His horse also stood with its muzzle down in the cool water. Taking his time before answering, Memphis Beck took a step sidelong away from the watering animal, rubbing his hand along its side until he stood clear of it with nothing behind him but the woods.

  “Sharp…? No. I wouldn’t say being sharp,” he said in his easy Southern voice. Now his thumb had hooked loosely behind his belt, idly narrowing the distance between his hand and the big pistol, yet in a most natural way. “Had I meant to be sharp, we wouldn’t be standing here right now…not both of us anyway.” There was a threat there, but it was spoken matter-of-factly, as if Dorsen Wheeler could make of it whatever suited him.

  “Let it go, Brother,” Eddie whispered cautiously to Dorsen, seeing him bristle a bit. “This is not the sort of man to get your bark on with.”

  “Oh, my bark is on, sure enough, Brother,” said Dorsen. “And I allow it’ll stay stuck tight until I get my concerns reconciled.”

  “Hole-in-the-wall is no different than any other place,” Memphis Beck offered out of the blue, responding to Dorsen’s earlier question. He stood relaxed, revealing nothing menacing in his eyes or demeanor. “Were you to ride in, you’d see that for yourself.”

  “Oh…?” Dorsen was taken aback. He gave his brother a curious look, as if having a hard time understanding Memphis Beck, either in words or actions. Had he misread the man? He watched the famous train robber raise his gun hand, take off his hat, and run his fingers back through his graying hair. Was this Beck’s way of easing a tense situation? Believing it was, Dorsen cooled down.

  “See, Dorsen, that’s all he meant,” said Eddie. “Don’t be so jackrabbit quick to jump ugly on a fellow.”

  Perhaps he had misread him. Dorsen eased up even more, letting his gun hand drop to his side. But Beck, having placed his hat back on his head, hooked his thumb back in place beneath his belly gun. Dorsen and Eddie didn’t seem to notice.

  “I reckon I have been stretched awfully tight of late,” Dorsen said after a moment, seeming to forget all the other times Beck had short-answered or outright ignored him. “I might blame some of it on living dirt-blanket out here amongst the snakes and heathens.” He offered a weak, tight smile to show his dark mood had begun to pass.

  Seeing the worst of what could have become a bad situation pass, Eddie took the opportunity to change the subject. “I might never make it to see Hole-in-the-wall, but damned if I don’t get the feeling the three of us are about to get ourselves mightily fixed.” He glanced back at Beck with a sly grin and a wink. “I bet you’re as ready for that as we both are, eh, Memphis?”

  Without changing his stoic expression, Memphis gave a slight nod and replied, “I’m always on the lookout to get mightily fixed.”

  “See?” Eddie said to Dorsen. “It goes to show you, we’re all the same one scratch under the surface.” He turned his face toward the trail, he and his brother riding a few paces ahead of Memphis Beck.

  Beck stared at their backs, picturing how easy it would be to slip his revolver from his holster and effortlessly put a bullet in their hearts. Bang, bang, just like that, he told himself. But then he smiled to himself and put the notion out of his mind. There had been a time though…

  But that time had been long ago, back before he came to realize that the lives of men like these two were truly not worth the price of a bullet, let alone worth shattering the silence of a peaceful trail and filling the air with the smell of burnt powder. Besides, he reminded himself, it wouldn’t be long. He looked warily forward and along both sides of the trail. Surely whoever was dogging them would have taken a higher trail and been up there watching them cross the grasslands.

  Nudging his horse, Beck offered himself a faint grin as he felt the trail slant upward beneath his horse’s hooves. He had a strong feeling the Wheelers were about to get themselves “mightily fixed” for good.

  The ranger sat at the top of the thin trail, knowing how difficult it would be for the Wheelers to spread out or make a fast turnaround and get away. This would be it, he was certain. They would be too, he thought, once they rounded the steep turn and found him waiting. He’d tucked his right glove behind his belt. His rifle stood propped up on his thigh, his thumb over the hammer. His pearl gray sombrero lay back off his head, on his shoulders, held there by a thin loop of rawhide. He sat quietly, resolved to facing whatever outcome lay in store. Beneath him the stallion stood as still as stone—no newcomer to this grave and deadly situation.

  Sam listened to the sound of quiet banter and approaching clop of hoof on stone as the horses walked into sight. Upon seeing him facing them midtrail, the Wheelers reined their horses back hard, in surprise. Behind them, Memphis Beck stopped and backed his horse calmly. He had not yet rounded the turn. Had the ranger seen him? He didn’t think so.

  “Dorsen and Eddie Wheeler,” the ranger called out as a matter of form, “I’m Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack. You are both under arrest for murder. Throw down your guns.”

  “Like hell!” Dorsen blurted out, his hand going for his gun even as his horse reared slightly against the tightened reins. “Kill him, Brother!” he bellowed.

  But beside him Eddie shouted, “Wait!” as if it would only be fair and sporting of both the ranger and his brother, Dorsen, to give him a second to settle his spooked horse before making a grab for his pistol.

  But neither man offered him a sporting chance. Before Dorsen’s gun leveled toward the ranger, the ranger’s rifle snapped upward from his thigh and fired. The shot nailed Dorsen midchest and sent him flying backward as his revolver fired wild and flew from his hands. In that split second it dawned on Eddie Wheeler for the first time just how truly fast his brother had been with a gun—fast, but not fast enough.

  “Don’t try it,” the ranger warned. But even as he’d spoken the words, his right hand levered a fresh round into the rifle. Eddie Wheeler barely got his gun barrel above holster level. As he made his play, he let out an enraged scream, as if that would somehow work to his advantage. It didn’t.

  From his position out of sight, Beck heard the second rifle shot and shook his head. No surprise there, he told himself, and backed his horse slowly out of sight behind a large boulder at the turn of the trail. He’d begun to turn the horse on the narrow trail. But he stopped when he heard the ranger call out, “Warren Beck…throw out your guns and come forward.”

  Beck stopped and took a deep breath. “So you recognized me, huh?” He eyed the narrow trail and weighed his chances of getting down it alive, the ranger right on his heels.

  “Throw them out, Beck,” Sam warned him. “We’ll talk more afterwards.”

  Beck ran things through his mind. It had been a long time since he’d ridden on a job with the Hole-in-the-wall Gang. The railroad detectives had been quiet lately. The fact was, nobody had ever linked him to the gang with any witnesses, or any solid proof. He wasn’t wanted by the regular law for anything in Arizona Territory, New Mexico, either; he was certain. Still…

  “What’s the charge, Ranger?” he asked calmly as he slipped the big Dance Brothers from his belly holster, checked it, and cocked it, just in case.

  “None as far as I’m concerned,” said Sam, his rifle ready at his shoulder. “But I don’t like thinking you’re sitting there out of sight, ready to throw down on me. The longer you put me off, the more I’m going to convince myself that you were partnered up with the Wheelers, not just making a trail with them.”

  “What if I just ride away, Ranger?” Beck asked.

  “You know that’s not the way it works, Beck,” Sam said.


  “You’re right, I was just making a trail with these two.” He smiled to himself. “A man never knows when he might come upon some hostiles in this high country. It pays to have something to feed to them.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Sam. “But unless I see some iron on the dirt, you’ll be riding with them facedown, partners or not.”

  Memphis Beck considered it a moment longer, knowing that the ranger meant every word he said.

  Sam held his rifle at ready. After almost a full minute of silence, he watched a hand reach out from around the edge of his rock cover and toss a rifle into the dirt.

  “That’s a good start,” Sam said flatly.

  The hand pitched the big Dance Brothers to the dirt with a soft plop. “I don’t carry a hideaway gun,” Beck called out.

  “And I don’t tolerate liars,” Sam replied. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot here.”

  Another short silence passed; then a short-barreled.38-caliber pistol plopped softly beside the big Dance Brothers. “I almost forgot this one,” Beck said matter-of-factly.

  “I bet. Now step out here, slow and easy,” Sam said.

  Beck stepped into sight and calmly walked toward him, saying as he drew nearer, “This is a waste of your time and mine, Ranger.” He looked hesitant and said, “Unless you have a deal with the railroad, I’m clean all around these parts.” He kept his hands chest high.

  “I don’t work with the railroads,” said Sam. “I figure you must be clean, else you would never have given up your guns without a fight.”

  “You got that right,” Beck said, looking around at the Wheelers lying dead in the dirt. “One of us would be dead right now.” He sounded insincere, as if he’d heard so many threats and so much tough talk that he took none of it serious anymore.

  “I expect that’s so.” Sam looked the infamous outlaw up and down. “We’ll know for sure how clean you are once we get to town. If the law in New Mexico Territory doesn’t want you, you’ll be free to ride away.”