Dead Before Sundown

by William W. Johnstone

  She was fast, and Palmer wasn’t in the best shape in the world. She began to pull away from him.

  He ought to just let her go, he thought. Out here alone and on foot, with no gun and no supplies, she wouldn’t last long.

  But she would be a loose end, and he didn’t like those. He thought he might still be able to get some use out of her, too, even if it was just to warm his blankets. Looked like he wasn’t ever going to get any comfort from Charlotte Marat, so he might as well take it where he could find it.

  He ignored his pounding heart and summoned up some more speed. When he was close enough behind the blonde, he launched himself in a diving tackle that brought her down and sent both of them rolling in the grass.

  The woman cried out in anger as she tried to get away from Palmer. He grabbed her and threw himself on top of her. The belt had come loose from her wrists. She flailed punches at him until he managed to grab her wrists and pin her arms to the ground. With him lying on top of her, she bucked and heaved but couldn’t throw him off.

  “Damn it, stop fighting!” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You son of a bitch! Let go of me! Oh!”

  Palmer was well aware that he was lying on top of some nicely curved female flesh. He couldn’t help but respond to that.

  She must have felt his response, because she started struggling even harder. Palmer bore down on her and said, “Blast it, I’m gonna knock you out if you don’t stop fightin’!”

  “Try it, you bastard!” she yelled in defiance.

  Palmer let go of her left wrist and tried to use his right hand to clout her on the jaw. She was too fast for him, though. Her hand shot up. Her arm blocked his punch, and she reached across to grab his wounded ear and give it a vicious twist. Palmer howled in pain.

  He hurt so bad that his grip on her loosened. She twisted away from him and tried to get up so she could run again. She had made it to hands and knees when he lunged after her and snagged her leg. He yanked it out from under her, which sent her plunging face first into the dirt.

  Palmer tried not to think about how much his ear hurt or how he could feel the hot, wet trickle of blood down the side of his face. He scrambled on top of her again, and this time since she was face down she couldn’t muster as much of a fight. He got hold of an arm and twisted it behind her, making her cry out.

  He put his other hand on the back of her neck and held her down. “I oughta kill you, you little bitch!” he roared.

  “Go ahead,” she urged him through clenched teeth. “Go ahead, damn you!”

  “Not hardly.” He kept her arm trapped behind her and slid his other arm around her neck, tightening it into a choke hold that cut off her air. After a minute he got his legs underneath him and heaved to his feet, dragging her up with him. He marched her back toward the horses.

  When they got there, Palmer threw her on the ground so hard that she rolled over a couple of times. She lay there struggling to catch her breath as she lifted her head and glared up at him.

  Palmer’s gun had stayed in its holster despite all the ruckus. He drew the weapon now and pointed it at the blonde.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. There’s a lot more at stake here than just you.”

  “What are you … talking about?” she asked.

  “Gold,” he said. “And plenty of it. Does that interest you?”

  “Not near as much … as killing you would,” she managed to say with a sneer.

  “Yeah, well, that’s not gonna happen, so you might as well forget about it,” he said. “But if you cooperate with me, you might come out ahead on this deal.”

  “You’re trying to … buy me off?”

  “I’d rather do that than shoot you.” Palmer smiled. “Better gold than lead, right?”

  She stared at him for a long moment before saying, “What’s to stop me from telling you I’ll cooperate and then double-crossing you?”

  “The fact that you know I’ll kill you if you try something like that. And the fact that your hands are going to be tied most of the time. But I can take it a little easier on you if you promise you won’t try to get away again.”

  She appeared to consider what he was saying, then asked, “You’ll stay away from me? You won’t lay a hand on me?”

  “Not like that, if that’s the way you want it. You’re pretty good-looking, but to tell you the truth, I’m more interested in that gold than in anything you’ve got.”

  She pushed herself up into a sitting position. “You’re a vile son of a bitch.”

  “And the more you remember that, the better off we’ll both be,” Palmer said with a chuckle.

  She sighed. “All right. I’ll cooperate … for now.”

  “Good. You can get up, build a fire, and fix us some coffee and something to eat.” Palmer paused. “I remember you from that bunch of mail-order brides in Skagway, but I don’t recall your name.”

  She got up and brushed herself off, saying with obvious reluctance, “It’s Meg.”

  “All right, Meg, get to work. You play along with me and you’ll come out of this all right. Maybe better than all right.”

  She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “You know Frank’s going to come after you and kill you, don’t you?”

  “Frank Morgan?” Palmer smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Morgan’s dead. I shot him myself and saw him go down.”

  Meg caught her breath as a stricken look appeared on her face.

  “So are the other two who were with you,” Palmer went on. “It’s just you and me now, Meg, and that’s the way it’s gonna be from now on.”

  Even as he spoke, Palmer hoped he was right. He didn’t know for sure that Frank Morgan was dead.

  But even if the gunfighter was still alive, Palmer had himself an ace in the hole.

  A blond ace in the hole, and he was going to hang on to her until the time was right.

  Chapter 28

  Later in the morning, Frank set out again to search for the horses. His frustration grew when he didn’t see any sign of them. When they stampeded, they must not have stopped running for a long time.

  It was impossible for him not to think about Meg being Joe Palmer’s prisoner. Frank was worried about her, but he had learned over the years not to let himself be consumed by worry when he couldn’t do anything about the situation.

  Which meant he needed to do something. It might be a waste of time, but he and Reb and Salty were going to have to start after Palmer on foot. Taking Salty along would slow them down a little, but it couldn’t be helped. Frank wasn’t going to abandon the old-timer here in the wilderness.

  When he got back to the camp, Reb and Salty watched him come striding up. They wore disappointed looks on their faces.

  “Didn’t find any o’ them durned fool jugheads, did you?” Salty asked.

  “No,” Frank said. “We’re going to have to hoof it out of here ourselves.”

  “Walk?” Salty said in the horrified disbelief of an old range rider. “All the way to Calgary?”

  “Maybe not that far, if we’re lucky,” Reb said. “The countryside can’t be completely empty between here and there. There’s bound to be a ranch or even a small settlement where we can get our hands on some mounts.”

  Salty raked fingers through his beard. “Y’all go on,” he said after a moment. “I ain’t up to a long walk like that, not with this dang bullet hole in my side. I’d just hold you back.”

  Frank shook his head. “Forget it, Salty. We’re not leaving you here. We’ll just take it at a pace you can manage.”

  “Dadgum it! You can’t do that. Meg’s more important than me. An old pelican like me ain’t got a lot of time left anyway, so if anything was to happen to me, it ain’t no great loss to anybody. But Meg’s got her whole life in front of her.”

  “Salty’s got a point, Frank,” Reb put in. “I don’t like the idea of leaving him here, either, but if we’re gonna save Meg
—”

  “If we’re going to save Meg, we’re going to do it together,” Frank broke in with a tone of finality in his voice.

  The other two men looked at him intently for a second; then Reb shrugged.

  “I don’t know about you, Salty, but I reckon it ain’t safe to argue too much with a famous gunfighter like the Drifter.”

  Salty sighed. “Yeah, you’re right about that. I’ve knowed him long enough to know how dadblamed stubborn he can be when he wants to.”

  Frank nodded and drew his knife from its sheath. “I’m going to cut a branch off one of those trees and make a walking stick out of it,” he said. “That’ll make things a mite easier for you, Salty. Reb, make a couple of packs out of our supplies. We’ll have to travel pretty light, since we’ll be carrying those packs.”

  “We’re takin’ along plenty of ammunition, though, right?” Reb said.

  Frank nodded. “Yeah. Plenty of ammunition.”

  They set out about half an hour later, Frank and Reb with the packs of supplies slung on their backs, Salty clutching the pine branch that Frank had cut and shaped into a walking stick. Frank had wrapped more bandages around the old-timer’s midsection, binding the dressing over the wound in place as tightly as he could.

  “It’s so tight I can’t hardly breathe,” Salty said. “But I can move around without it hurtin’ too bad.”

  “As long as it doesn’t start bleeding again, you ought to be all right,” Frank said.

  “I ain’t worried about a little blood, as long as there ain’t too much of it.”

  Everyone was ahead of them now: Palmer, Meg, and the Métis revolutionaries who had both the gold and the Gatling guns in their possession. At least, everyone that they knew of, Frank corrected himself as he thought about their situation. It might be a smart idea to keep an eye on their back trail anyway.

  Out here on the frontier, you couldn’t ever be sure about what might be coming up behind you.

  Frank’s feet already hurt, and it wasn’t long before Reb and Salty were limping a little, too. They pushed on stoically, though, stopping to rest only occasionally.

  By midday they had covered a couple of miles. When they stopped to rest and eat a sparse lunch, Salty sat down on a rock and started to take one of his boots off.

  “Better not do that,” Frank warned him. “If you do, you’re liable not to be able to put it on again because your foot would swell up. Then we really would have to leave you behind.”

  Salty grimaced. “Yeah, I didn’t think about that. We’re gonna have to wear these dang boots until we find ourselves some horses, ain’t we?”

  “That would be best.”

  Reb smiled and said, “Just think about how good it’ll feel when you finally do get to take ‘em off, Salty.”

  “Each foot’ll be nothing but a big ol’ blister by then,” Salty groused. “But don’t mind me. I’ll make it.”

  “I know you will,” Frank said. “You don’t get to be as old as you are without being mighty stubborn.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Salty muttered.

  “I was.”

  After a while they started out again on their trek. Frank had been alert for droppings or any other sign of the horses. He hadn’t completely given up on the chance of finding some of their mounts, even now.

  Around the middle of the afternoon, he spotted some hoofprints and called a halt. He pointed them out, and Reb sounded a little excited as he asked, “Are those our horses?”

  “Not unless they found some friends,” Frank said with a slight frown. “At least a dozen horses left those prints.”

  It was true. A large group of riders had come through here sometime in the past couple of days, moving south to north through the foothills and cutting across the path of Frank and his companions, who were headed east.

  “Who do you reckon they were?” Salty asked. “Them Metties, or however you say it?”

  “Could be, but why would they be going north?” Frank mused. He tried to remember maps of Canada he had seen. “From here, there’s not much in that direction except a big empty, all the way to Edmondton. We figured they were headed for Calgary.”

  “We figured, but we don’t know that for sure,” Reb pointed out. “Do you think we should follow these tracks?”

  Frank pondered the question for a long moment before finally shaking his head. “I saw the hoofprints that the Métis’s horses left back there where they bushwhacked Lundy’s gang. I don’t think these were made by the same animals.”

  Salty snatched his hat off and looked as if he was going to slam it to the ground in disgust, but he must have decided not to because picking it up would be difficult with those bandages wrapped so tightly around him.

  “You mean there’s another bunch o’ varmints wanderin’ around out here? For hell’s sake, there weren’t this many people in San Francisco the last time I was there!”

  Frank had to smile. “Yeah, it’s pretty crowded for the middle of nowhere,” he agreed. “But these folks may not have anything to do with the ones we’re after.”

  “Wish they’d left a few o’ them horses behind,” Salty muttered. “My feet ain’t never gonna be the same. It’s plumb unnatural for a man to have to walk so dang much, that’s what it is!”

  Reb said, “I can’t argue with you there, old-timer.”

  “Come on,” Frank said. “Whoever these fellas were, they’re long gone.”

  By late afternoon they had covered several more miles. The hills around them were smaller now. The plains weren’t too far off, and once they reached the plains Calgary would be relatively close.

  But even so, that meant several more days of walking, and Frank wasn’t sure any of them were up to that, especially Salty. The old-timer looked particularly haggard when Frank called a halt and said they would camp at the base of a wooded knoll.

  Despite his obvious exhaustion, Salty said, “There’s still some daylight left. Let me just catch my breath, and then I’ll be able to keep goin’ a while longer.”

  Frank shook his head. “No, we’re staying here. I want to check that dressing and make sure the wound hasn’t started bleeding again, and we all need some rest.”

  “Wish there was a nice icy stream somewhere close by, so I could soak these feet of mine,” Reb said.

  “That sounds good, but remember, keep your boots on.”

  Reb nodded. “Sure, Frank, I know.”

  Salty took his shirt off. Frank unwrapped the bandages. A little blood had oozed from the crease in the old-timer’s side during the day, which made the dressing stick. Frank eased it off and studied the wound. It still looked raw and ugly, but the flesh around it wasn’t red or swollen. That was his main concern.

  “It looks like it’s healing all right,” he told Salty. “I’ll just bind it up again.”

  “I reckon my feet probably look a lot worse. Dang, if the good Lord meant for man to walk, he wouldn’t have given us critters to ride!”

  They kept their fire small and put it out before darkness settled down. The food and coffee made them feel better, but utter exhaustion was stealing over them quickly.

  “I’ll stand first watch,” Frank said. “Then you, Reb, and you, Salty. That sound all right?”

  The other two men nodded their agreement. Salty stretched out in his blankets while the western sky over the mountains still held a tinge of red from the sun. Within minutes, he was snoring.

  Reb didn’t doze off that quickly. He spread his blankets, then looked up at Frank, who sat nearby on a slab of rock holding his Winchester.

  “You reckon Meg’s all right tonight?” Reb asked quietly.

  “I’m sure she is. Like Salty said earlier, if there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s taking care of herself.”

  “This frontier is no place for a woman like her.”

  “That just shows that you don’t know her very well,” Frank said. “A woman like Meg, with the spirit she has, isn’t going to be happy sitting in a parlor an
d knitting booties. She’s got to be out and around, doing things and seeing whatever there is to see.”

  “Yeah, well, one of these days she’s gonna want that parlor and those booties, I’ll bet.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “She probably wishes she was in a parlor somewhere right now, instead of being Palmer’s prisoner.”

  “You’re not helping matters, Reb,” Frank said flatly.

  “Maybe not. But I can’t help worryin’ about her.”

  “Neither can I … and I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.”

  “You and her … I mean, the two of you ain’t … you’re not—”

  “Meg and I are friends,” Frank said, not wanting to sit there and listen to the young man stumble around what he was trying to say. “Good friends, but that’s all.”

  “That’s kind of what I figured.” Reb sighed. “Guess I’d better get some shut-eye.”

  “That’d be a good idea,” Frank said.

  After a quiet, peaceful night, they were up again at first light in the morning. From the pained way Salty was hobbling around, Frank didn’t know how far he would be able to go today. His own feet were in pretty bad shape, and Reb’s probably were, too.

  Salty tottered across the campsite and sank down on a log. “You’re gonna have to leave me here today, Frank,” he said. “I can’t go on.”

  “Salty, I—”

  “Damn it, listen to me. You owe it to Meg. You already wasted enough time takin’ it easy on me yesterday. You got to go after her as fast as you can now.”

  Reb said, “That’s not gonna be very fast. I’m not walkin’ too good myself today.”

  Frank came to his feet. “Blast it, I’m not giving up, and neither are you two. Salty, we’ll rig a travois and pull you.”

  “A travois? Frank, you’ve gone plumb loco—”

  Frank held up a hand to stop Salty’s argument.

  “Blast it, I ain’t gonna shut up—”

  “Listen,” Frank said.

  Hoofbeats sounded through the early morning air. There were quite a few horses, Frank judged.

  And they were coming closer, too.