Dead Man Walking

by William W. Johnstone

  Luke let go of McCaskill’s collar and reached to help the marshal. “I don’t imagine you have much call for one.”

  “Nope. I have to throw a liquored-up cowpoke in here every once in a while, but that’s about it.”

  Luke motioned for Hennessy to step aside. He took hold of the beam and lifted it out of the brackets. When he started to lean it against the smokehouse wall, he spotted McCaskill trying to crawl away. The outlaw had regained consciousness. Luke wondered how long he’d been shamming.

  McCaskill must have thought he could crawl off for a few yards, then leap to his feet and make a dash for his horse. He tried to jump up, but Luke tossed the beam and it caught the outlaw across the back. The weight was enough to knock McCaskill facedown on the street and brought a groan from him.

  Luke planted a booted foot on McCaskill’s head and said, “You’re a determined one, aren’t you? I suppose I can see why, since you’re bound to hang. But you’re starting to annoy me, Jimmy.” He drew one of his Remingtons. “It would be a lot easier just to haul your carcass to the county seat.”

  “Here now,” Marshal Hennessy blustered. “Gunning a man when he’s trying to shoot you is one thing, but that’d be pure murder, mister.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m a patient man . . . within reason.” Luke stepped back and kept McCaskill covered while the outlaw climbed to his feet and stumbled into the smokehouse. Luke replaced the beam, effectively locking him in.

  Now that he had a thick door between him and Luke’s guns, McCaskill regained some of his bravado. “You’re gonna be sorry, you damn bounty hunter. Deuce is gonna get me outta here, and we’ll see to it that you die slow and painful.”

  “Deuce Roebuck, you mean?” Luke said. “I hate to break it to you, Jimmy, but the last I saw of Deuce, he was fogging it out of here and never looked back. I expect he’s at least five miles away by now. By nightfall, he’ll have gone twenty miles and completely forgotten about you.”

  “You just wait and see,” McCaskill said, but his voice had a quaver in it that revealed his confidence was slipping.

  Luke turned back to the marshal. “Do you have an undertaker here in town?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t figure you wanted to have those other two buried. Don’t you have to take them to the county seat, too, to collect the bounties on them?”

  “Yes, but I thought maybe he could clean them up a little. Blood attracts flies, you know.”

  Hennessy pursed his lips. “He’ll do it . . . but he’ll charge you for it.”

  “If it makes the ride a little more pleasant, it’ll probably be worth it.” Luke paused. “Of course, I suppose I could just cut their heads off and throw them in a gunnysack . . .”

  Chapter Two

  Summerville’s undertaker was a tall, cadaverous man who introduced himself to Luke as Clifford Ferguson. Luke had wondered sometimes why undertakers all seemed to be either thin to the point of gauntness and dour or fat and jolly. He hardly ever ran into one of normal size, with a normal demeanor. He supposed the most likely explanation was that some men who dealt with death all the time lost their appetite, while others coped with the strains of their grim profession by embracing the pleasures of life, including plenty of good food.

  Ferguson agreed to clean up the bodies of Son Barton and Ed Logan. A search of their saddlebags turned up a spare shirt and trousers for each man, so Ferguson would dress them in those duds and burn the blood-soaked clothes. He named a price of two dollars per corpse for the service.

  Luke handed over a five-dollar gold piece he had also found in one of the saddlebags and got a silver dollar in change.

  “I ain’t sure I ever saw a bounty hunter quite so picky about the carcasses he hauled in to collect the blood money on ’em,” Marshal Hennessy commented as he and Luke stood on the boardwalk in front of the saloon watching Ferguson and his stocky Mexican assistant load the bodies onto a wagon.

  “It’s summer, and Singletary is half a day’s ride away,” Luke said. “I actually considered asking Mr. Ferguson to go ahead and embalm them, just to cut down on the stink, but I decided that would be too much of an expense. The bounty on the three I’m taking in only adds up to eighteen hundred dollars, eight hundred for Barton and five hundred apiece on the other two, and they had less than twenty dollars between them in their saddlebags. They went through the loot from their recent jobs quickly.”

  “Eighteen hunnerd bucks is a damn fine chunk of money.” Hennessy added sourly, “The town only pays me sixty dollars a month, plus half the fines I collect. That’s better than cowboying, but not by much.”

  “In that case, Marshal, let me buy you a drink,” Luke suggested.

  Hennessy shook his head. “My stomach won’t take whiskey no more. They call it rotgut, and it surely lived up to its name.” He inclined his head toward a small frame building diagonally across the street and went on. “I’ve got a pot of coffee on the stove in the office, though, if you’re of a mind.”

  “Thank you, Marshal. That sounds good.”

  The coffee probably wasn’t good—Luke had come across very few local lawmen who could brew a decent cup—but he didn’t figure it would hurt anything to accept Hennessy’s invitation. The likelihood that he would ever pass through Summerville again was small. He couldn’t rule it out, though, and being on good terms with the local star packer sometimes came in handy.

  They walked across to the marshal’s office. The coffee actually wasn’t as bad as Luke expected, although it would be a stretch to call it good. He thumbed back the black hat on his head and perched a hip on the corner of Hennessy’s paper-littered desk while the marshal sagged into an old swivel chair behind it.

  “Jensen,” Hennessy said musingly. “I reckon you get asked all the time if you’re related to Smoke Jensen, the famous gunfighter they write all those dime novels about.”

  “From time to time,” Luke admitted.

  “Well . . . are you?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Luke said, “Smoke is my brother.”

  It was true. For many years, his younger brother Kirby—known far and wide as Smoke—had believed that Luke was dead, killed in the Civil War. In reality, violent and tragic circumstances had led to Luke carving out a new life for himself after the war, with a new name as well. Only in recent years had he gone back to using the name Jensen, but he kept the profession he had chosen—bounty hunting.

  Hennessy stared at him for a couple of seconds, then said, “You’re joshin’ me.”

  Luke shrugged. “It’s the truth, Marshal. I haven’t seen Smoke for a while. Mostly he goes his way and I go mine. He has a successful ranch over in Colorado to look after, you know.”

  “And you’re just a driftin’ bounty killer.”

  “We each have our own destiny. Some philosophers believe that our fates are locked into place before we’re even born.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Seems to me that a fella’s always got the choice of takin’ a different trail if he wants to.”

  “It’s certainly nice to think so.” Luke took another sip of coffee and looked idly at the papers scattered across Hennessy’s desk. Most of them were reward posters. “You get these dodgers when the stagecoach brings the mail?”

  “Yep. Sheriff Collins sends ’em to me.”

  Luke moved some of the papers around and then tapped a finger against one of them. “There’s the reward poster for Son Barton. It’s possible the posters for the other three are somewhere in here, too.”

  Hennessy frowned. “What are you gettin’ at, Jensen? You think I should’ve known those boys were in town and tried to arrest ’em myself? I know Summerville ain’t a very big place, but I can’t keep track of every long rider who drifts in and then back out again.”

  Luke had a feeling the marshal didn’t want to know when outlaws were in his town. That would mean going out of his way to risk his life for a salary that certainly wasn’t exorbitant. As long as visitors to Summerville didn’t cause any troub
le, Hennessy was perfectly content to let them go on their way.

  Luke couldn’t blame him for that. “That’s perfectly understandable, Marshal.”

  Something else among the papers caught Luke’s eye. He pushed some of the reward dodgers aside and picked up what appeared to be a piece of butcher paper. The writing on it hadn’t been done with a printing press, like the other wanted posters. Someone had used a piece of coal to scrawl in big letters at the top WANTED, and below that in slightly smaller letters Three-fingered Jack McKinney.

  “What’s this?” Luke asked.

  Hennessy leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Reckon the sheriff thought I’d get a laugh out of it. He sent a note sayin’ that they been poppin’ up around the county. Homemade wanted posters ain’t exactly legal.”

  “‘Wanted for being a thief and a killer and a no-account scoundrel’,” Luke read from the poster. “‘Reward’”—he looked up at Hennessy—“‘Reward $1.42 and a harmonica. The harmonica is only six months old.’”

  The marshal chuckled. “It’s a joke. Some kid wrote it. You can tell by the writing. He’s probably got a friend named Jack McKinney and figured it’d be funny to fix up a wanted poster with his name on it.”

  “Maybe. But you just said Sheriff Collins told you they’d been posted in other parts of the county. Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to for a joke.”

  “You can’t never tell what a kid will do. It can’t be real. Who’d ever go after an outlaw for a measly $1.42 bounty?”

  “And a harmonica,” Luke reminded him. “Don’t forget the harmonica.”

  “Well, if you want to go after this Three-fingered Jack, whoever he is, you just feel free to take that dodger with you. You might need it to collect the ree-ward.” Hennessy slapped his thigh and laughed some more about it.

  As Luke finished his coffee, he folded the handmade wanted poster and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  The marshal didn’t even seem to notice.

  * * *

  After leaving the marshal’s office, Luke went by the undertaking parlor to see how Ferguson was coming along with the job on Son Barton and Ed Logan. Ferguson promised they would be done by evening, but since Luke wasn’t planning to leave until the next morning, the undertaker suggested, “I can put them down in the root cellar if you’d like. Keep them cooler overnight. That might help with the smell tomorrow.”

  “I’d be obliged to you for that.”

  “Only cost you another dollar.”

  Luke smiled as he handed back the silver dollar Ferguson had given him in change earlier. He suspected the undertaker had had that in mind all along.

  That left Luke at loose ends. Summerville didn’t have a hotel, so when he gathered up his own horse and the mounts belonging to the three outlaws and led them to the town’s only livery stable, he asked the hostler, “What are the chances that I can sleep in the hayloft tonight?”

  “If you’ve got four bits to spare, mister, I’d say the chances are real good,” the man replied. “And four bits for each of the horses, so that adds up to, uh . . .”

  Luke dropped three silver dollars in the callused, outstretched palm. “Give them a little extra grain and we’ll call it square.”

  This stop in Summerville was getting expensive, but for now he was using the money he had found in the outlaws’ saddlebags. If the total wound up going over that amount, he would recoup the funds when he collected the rewards in the county seat.

  With that taken care of, he drifted back to the saloon. Doolittle was still behind the bar. Somebody had mopped up the blood that had been spilled earlier, and the customers who had been chased out of the place by gunplay had returned.

  In addition, three soiled doves in shabby dresses sat together at a table, their services not in demand at the moment. All of them showed the wear and tear of the hard life they led. No amount of paint could cover that up.

  Doolittle cast a nervous glance across the bar at Luke. “You’re not plannin’ on shooting up the place again, are you?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it the first time.” Luke’s voice hardened as he added, “And I’d sort of like to know how Son Barton even knew I was here.”

  One of the doves spoke up. “I can tell you that, mister. He had just finished with me—and mighty damn quick, I might add—and got up to look out the window. He said, ‘It’s that damn bounty hunter’ and some other things that I’m not even comfortable repeatin’. Then he yanked on his clothes, grabbed his pistol, and ran out of the room. Nobody who works here tipped him off, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  Luke nodded slowly. He hadn’t been aware that the outlaws knew he was on their trail, but he supposed someone he had questioned regarding their whereabouts could have gotten word to them to be on the lookout for him and described him.

  “Felicia’s right, Mr. Jensen,” Doolittle said. “We don’t mix in our customers’ affairs. Anybody’s got a problem with anybody else, we try to stay out of it.”

  “A wise way to be,” Luke said.

  Doolittle reached for a bottle and a glass. “Since you didn’t get to finish that drink earlier, how about you have another one now, on the house?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Doolittle. You’re a gentleman and a scholar.”

  Doolittle filled the glass and pushed it across the bar. “Not hardly, but I can pour a drink.”

  That was the only thing anybody in Summerville had offered to do for Luke without charging him for it.

  A little later, the soiled dove called Felicia went over to the bar and made it pretty clear she wouldn’t mind if Luke took her upstairs, but he wasn’t sure if she intended for it to be a business transaction or not.

  He had always had pretty good luck with women. They seemed to find him attractive despite his craggy features and the gray that was starting to appear in his dark hair. But unlike some men, being involved in a shooting scrape didn’t leave him puffing and pawing at the ground like a bull, so he diverted Felicia’s veiled suggestion as politely as possible.

  The only eating place in town was a hash house owned by a pigtailed Chinaman. Luke had supper there, then went back to the stable, climbed into the loft, and settled down to sleep.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was after he’d dozed off that an explosion woke him.