Cutthroat Gulch

by Richard S. Wheeler

  But Blue decided he wouldn’t follow. That was a funny thing. He was tired of being led by the nose by a clever killer trying to torment him. Now Castle wanted him to find those tracks and follow toward some other little surprise, but Blue was damned if he would, stubborn as he was. He knew what he would do: he would ride up Axe Canyon and find the older tracks there, the tracks of the man who rode down Steve Cooper and murdered him with a shotgun, tracks Jack Castle might not want him to follow, that would lead into the high country and maybe even into Castle’s hideaway.

  Blue stepped out of the shadow of the porch, crossed the yard, studied the horses in the catch-pen and realized that Castle had left them alone, almost as if he were inviting Blue to saddle up and follow. Blue’s old stock saddle rested on the corral rail, unmolested. Maybe Castle was watching him right then from one of those vast slopes, maybe not. Maybe he had a fancy brass spy glass. Maybe Castle was watching Blue through buckhorn gun sights. Blue didn’t care. He bridled and saddled Steve’s ranch horse, then haltered, pack-saddled and loaded the buckskin he had ridden two days before, and put the rest of the stock out to pasture. He steered toward Axe Canyon, leading the burdened buckskin, climbing slowly along a laughing creek. Then, just before the canyon enclosed him, he paused and twisted around in the saddle. Below him was Steve and Tammy’s paradise, dew glistening on the grass, the snowcapped ridges orange in the first light. He felt a moment of tenderness, and then sorrow. So much lost. Then he touched his heels to the flanks of the horse.

  “All right, Jack Castle, I’m coming,” he said. “You’ll think I’m behind you, where you want me, until you find out I’m in front.”

  Chapter 13

  The clear trail of two horses led up Axe Canyon, and Blue knew both animals. One was the coppery bay stolen from Steve Cooper’s pen, and the other was the killer’s own mount. Blue hoped the trail would lead to some hideaway high in the mountains, where Castle had holed up; a place Castle would return to. Blue considered the prospect of ambush, and knew there was little he could do. This twisted, steep-walled declivity carved in the side of the mountains offered a bushwhacker a crack at him every few yards, and no amount of alertness could spare him the fatal shot, if that is what Castle chose to do. But Blue had acquired a few understandings over his decades of lawing, and the most important was to know the mind of the man he was hunting. All his wilderness and tracking skills were valuable, but not so much as a keen insight into the killer’s mind. Blue was betting the jackpot that Castle wasn’t ready to ambush him; that Castle was enacting a dream he had nursed during all those years in the pen, to torment Blue as much as possible, and then kill him later. Yes, Castle would enjoy that, like a cat toying with the field mouse it would soon kill.

  So Blue rode ahead fatalistically. If a bullet felled him, then he was wrong. It was as dark and bleak as that. The thin trail traced a noisy creek that stair-stepped down the mountain, pouring icy water into Cooper’s meadows far below. Sometimes he pierced through thickets of pine, inhaling air balsamic and pungent, while other times he circled around rockslides, where marmots studied him or dodged, and the morning sun lit up pockets of yellow blooms.

  Any of those shifting landscapes could have harbored a killer, but Blue knew they wouldn’t. By mid-morning Blue topped what he thought was a pass, but found himself instead on a hanging plateau surrounded by snow and rock. The world below him spread blue and breathtaking. He could even see Centerville, but Blankenship lay beyond his vision to the northeast. From this amazing aerie, with a big enough telescope, Castle could have seen everything of consequence in thirty miles. Blue paused to rest his nags, and slid off Steve’s horse. It was time to ride the buckskin for a while. But there was still one thing to do: he walked back to the edge of the plateau, which afforded a view down Axe Canyon, and studied his back trail for several minutes. Satisfied that no one was behind him, he pulled the saddle off the tired ranch horse and threw it over the jittery buckskin. A fool green broke horse in the mountains was a dangerous thing, and Blue knew he would need to be careful. But Blue was always careful around horses.

  Castle had used this high country meadow for the same things, switching horses, rest, and observation. Blue found hoofprints, and also boot prints, the familiar, wide boot prints he first spotted clear back at the fishing hole. They were a killer’s boots, and the shape of their print had been scorched deep into Blue’s mind. In a way, that pleased him. He had followed those boots from there to here, sixty or seventy miles as the crow flies. He knew who he was pursuing, and he had a motive, and now his task was not to dog Castle like a bloodhound, but to outguess him. A biting wind swept the high plateau, the air straight off the snowfields above. Blue ignored the chill and began circling the plateau, finding plenty of tracks, many of them jumbled. But what counted were those that left this crow’s nest for the low country. He spotted none that led upslope into the forbidding gray and snowy peaks high above timber; the ones that interested him led downhill. One trail dropped toward the Cooper range, but not via Axe Canyon. Another went he knew not where, but a trail on the far northern edge of the plateau plummeted steeply toward Centerville.

  And that’s where he found the hat. There it was. Tammy’s hat, the one with the pink ribbon, tied to a bristlecone pine, flapping in the wind, waiting for Blue. Stolen right out of Tammy’s house when Blue was taking Tammy to Centerville. Blue blinked, not believing his eyes. Then he rode to it, raged at it, raged at the killer who was toying with him as if he were an idiot, the killer who made the fool out of him and laughed all the while.

  Blue quieted himself, stepped off the buckskin, untied Tammy’s hat, let the buckskin sniff it, and anchored it to the pommel with a saddle string. The killer wanted him to rush for Centerville; protect Tammy. Jack Castle was jerking the puppet strings again.

  Blue quieted himself. He might or might not head for Centerville on this trail. His task was to out-think Castle, and he was doing a poor job of it. It was as if Castle had been reading Blue’s mind, absorbing Blue’s ways, from boyhood, and knew how the older man would react. The truth of it was that Castle was uncanny.

  He hated to admit it, but he was no closer to finding Castle than he had ever been. And Castle was roaming mighty big country, hundreds of square miles. He might even be far away, out of the whole Territory by now. He might have a confederate planting these warnings, leading Blue around as if he were a bull with a ring in his nose, while Castle rode away to California or some place like that.

  Tracking was a lonely business. Blue sat his horse there, feeling as if he was the only person left in the world; as if all those good people down in Blankenship and Centerville didn’t know their sheriff was up in the high lonely, with only the soughing wind for a friend, hunting a vicious man who had once been almost a son. Blue steered the buckskin off the bleak plateau, and rode quietly two or three miles into deepening timber, where the air was still and the forest floor was covered with brown pine needles. This was a dry trail, except for springs every little while that leaked their waters into grassy bogs. At one of these little parks he stopped, hoping the mosquitoes wouldn’t be bad, and set up camp for the night. The forest guarded the glade so completely that Blue could barely glimpse the twilit sky, but that was good. He could have a fire that would not be seen. An odd loneliness pervaded this place, and his mind. He cussed his own pride; he should have gotten together a large posse, divided it into platoons, and sent fifty men into the mountains to hunt down Jack Castle. But he was too proud to rely on others; it was like using crutches, and he was damned if he would send large gangs out only to return empty-handed.

  Blue collected some downed wood, dry on top but moist on the bottom, broke it up, added tinder, and started a fire with a little gunpowder from one of his Springfield cartridges and a lucifer. After a long sullen moment the flame took, and soon Blue had some parched corn boiling in the skillet. Miserable fare; but it kept him going. He didn’t need much; never did, not even someone to talk to.

&nbs
p; He ate the mush with a flat spatula he whittled, there being no spoon, and began making a bed, scraping sticks and pebbles away before he laid out his bedroll. The horses grazed peacefully on their picket lines. Blue was feeling old. Maybe Castle was the better man and letting Blue know it, but that didn’t matter: better men made mistakes. And Blue’s job was to catch Castle, not engage in some duel.

  Dammit, he would have to get a posse together, and he hated the very idea. He hated all of this, especially that Jack Castle was waltzing around him as if he were some punch-drunk boxer stabbing slowly at wherever Castle had been moments before. But Blue wasn’t going to stop.

  “I’m coming, Castle,” he said. In the morning he started along that trail north, and soon found himself in an alpine paradise, where dark Stellar’s Jays and tuxedo-colored magpies set up a ruckus as he rode through verdant parks and meadows and aspen groves and stands of spruce. Why was nature so promiscuously beautiful just when his heart hurt?

  He switched horses half way down, knowing that descending was harder on a burdened horse than ascending. The trail led along a laughing creek that seduced his wariness until he knew he was as vulnerable as a greenhorn. Then, toward the supper hour, he found himself on a shelf of land overlooking Centerville, which basked in the June sun. A half hour later he hitched his horses at the Hjortsberg Hotel, stepped painfully into the gummy street, feeling the long day’s ride in his bones, and entered.

  The place was not guarded. He lumbered down a long corridor to Number six, and rapped.

  She opened at once.

  “Pa!”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes...I mean, I’m safe.”

  “There’s no guard.”

  “Zeke doesn’t have the men. And I can take care of myself.”

  She motioned him in. The room was cramped, with a spare cot. The children leapt up and crowded about their grandfather. He patted them.

  “I don’t like it here,” Joey said. “Can we go out?”

  “Soon, son,” he said.

  “What about you? Did you find him?” she asked.

  He shook his head, hating to admit defeat. “He left a few calling cards, Tammy. He killed Steve’s black dog and hung it from the porch... while I slept.”

  “Oh, oh...”

  “Muttonhead, Muttonhead,” Joey wailed. The boy dove for the cot and buried his head under a blanket.

  “Tell me how it went, Tammy...if you want to.”

  He pulled his hat off his head, and finding no place to sit, settled gingerly on the edge of the bed, hollowing the chenille spread, as out of place in this tiny enclave as a bull.

  “You mean Steve.” She stood at the window, which opened on an alley, her almond eyes staring into the hills. “We buried him yesterday. Just about everyone in town came. Zeke even had some guards posted around, just in case.”

  “Was it a good service?”

  “Oh, Dad, he’s gone, and it didn’t matter what they said. I don’t remember a word. He’s gone.”

  She had found no comfort, then. He studied her, finding her drawn and gaunt and dark-eyed, the pain radiating from her thin face. “I’ll go to the cemetery and pay my respects,” he said, miserably.

  “Dad, we’re going back to the ranch. I can’t stand it another hour here.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Then I’ll go and bear the risk. That’s my home, that’s where I belong, that’s where my children can heal. Not here. You can come with us tomorrow or not, but we’re going.”

  Blue thought of that hat still tied to his saddle, its pink ribbons trailing down the side of the horse.

  “Zeke have someone out there yet?”

  “Yes, a man called Cletus. Zeke says he’s reliable. Zeke’s even deputized him a few times. I know who he is. He’s a drover too.”

  “Well,” he said, “you have to play the cards you’re dealt. But Jack Castle’s not done with you.”

  She straightened, her gaze unwavering, her resolve deepening before his eyes. “You taught me to take care of myself,” she said. “And I will.”

  He nodded. That was her true inheritance. He had no money to bequeath to her, but he had a vision of what it took to live and prosper in a new land, and that he had given her, and tried to give to Absalom. “Supper’s on me,” he said. “Maisie’s Café open?”

  “Oh, boy, outa here!” Joey said.

  They paused at the hotel door, and Blue studied the empty business district. They were all living with fear now, hardly taking a step without surveying empty windows and dark alleys. He led them across the street toward the café, his mind awhirl. He couldn’t stop her from going back to the ranch, but maybe there was some good in it. Castle would know it soon enough and come prowling. Maybe Blue could set a trap.

  Chapter 14

  Blue found Zeke at his usual post at the green poker table, with a fat stack of white chips before him and a yellow cigar slimed into a corner of his purple mouth.

  “Blue,” Zeke said. “Let me fold.” He quit the hand and swiftly cashed in.

  Moments later the town constable and Blue strolled up the dark artery of Centerville, lit only by the eerie solstice twilight that turned the mountains into black teeth. A tang of wood smoke hung in the air, the residue of evening cook fires. Blue absorbed the peacefulness of the place. Crime just didn’t visit Centerville any more, not since the mining died away.

  “I had a man full-time at the hotel lobby until after the funeral,” Zeke said. “Hardly seems necessary any more, and I had trouble finding anyone to do it for free, since I ain’t got the budget.”

  Blue grunted, not quite approving. “You make any progress?”

  “Identifying the stranger? No. I’ve talked to every merchant and innkeeper and saloon man in town. No name.”

  “What about Castle?”

  “He was in here two days before that first murder over toward you. Not in any saloon though. He bought bullets from Jim Schott, the hardware man, that’s how I know.”

  “What caliber?”

  “Forty-five. One box.”

  “He go anywhere else?”

  “No. He just drifted in late one afternoon, just a passing stranger, bought bullets, paid with a five dollar greenback, and drifted out, and no one knew who he was... What about you?”

  Blue told him about the dead dog, about tracking Castle into the high country, finding Tammy’s hat—once again. But no sign of Jack Castle. “He’s running circles around me, Zeke. I feel like a pup.”

  “You need a posse? I could scratch up some men. Mostly blacksmiths, barkeeps and clerks, though.”

  “I hate the thought of it coming to that,” Blue said. “But that’s what it’s coming to. He’s up there. I want to get him myself. I want him worse than I ever wanted to nab anyone.”

  Zeke laughed. “He’s a smart one. But you’ll show him a thing or two, Blue. I’ve got tipsters all over town. Castle can’t ride in here without my learning about it in five minutes. He knows it, too. And if I find out anything, you’ll hear of it fast as I can reach you.”

  “Tammy’s going home tomorrow, Zeke. She wants to pick up the pieces.”

  “You letting her?”

  “It’s her life. I raised her to live it her way. She’s a tough cookie. Who’s this man you sent out there?”

  “Cletus Parsons? Cowboy, ranch hand, I’ve used him sometimes as a backup deputy when I’m away, good head on him. And reliable as long as he’s sober, just in case you’re wondering. I sent him out there, told him to look after things. He made some deal with Tammy, dollar a day a guess.”

  “He’s all there is between that killer and Tammy.”

  Zeke nodded, pulled a bag of Bull Durham from his pocket and a packet of papers, rolled a coffin nail, and lit up with a kitchen match he fired with a thumbnail. “Like you say, Smiths can take care of themselves,” Zeke said. “Tammy’s a cat with claws. Anything I can do, call on me.”

  Blue slept in the hayloft at the liver
y barn, sharing the place with a boozy cowboy. In the morning he harnessed Tammy’s dray, hooked it to the spring wagon, and drove the rig to the hotel.

  She was waiting. He loaded her in and settled the children.

  “Will you be coming?” she asked.

  “I’m going to prowl,” he said.

  “Get him,” she said, and surprised him with a buss to the cheek.

  “Good bye, Grampa,” Joey said.

  “You take care of your ma,” Blue replied. “She needs some caring.”

  He watched as she wheeled her rig out of Centerville. Suddenly he felt lonely. He was two days of hard riding from Olivia. He shuffled over to Maisie’s Café and spent his last four bits on fried-to-death ham, India rubber eggs and acid coffee.

  He soaked up a quart of the java, studied the local codgers who traded insults each dawn, thought about telling Zeke what he was up to, and decided against it. Blue was a loner. He enforced the law alone and got help only when he had no choice. Anyway, Zeke wouldn’t be up. He was a night owl, which was fine because no one had ever heard of a robbery at nine in the morning.

  Blue was in a sour mood. Wild goose chases. A smart aleck of a killer who knew Blue all too well and made a mockery of a manhunt. He strolled into an overcast morning, picked at his teeth, and decided to give her a two-hour head start. He would be going out to the Cooper ranch, ghosting along behind, but he didn’t want her to know it. He studied a wanted poster Zeke had nailed to the livery barn; a fairly good likeness of Jack Castle, two hundred dollar reward dead or alive. Contact Blue Smith, Sheriff.

  Good. Sometimes the posters and dodgers worked. He hoped that damned poster got nailed to every lodgepole pine in the county, and got read by every blue jay and gopher.

  Blue’s musings didn’t lift his spirits any. He saddled Steve Cooper’s ranch horse and haltered the buckskin, ignoring the help offered by the hostler, and rode quietly out of town, along that lonely road to Tammy’s place. This time he stayed off the path as much as he could, but there were places where land and water hemmed him. He didn’t want to be seen this gray day.