Black Hills Badman

by Jon Sharpe

  “We’re all just so scared, Tom. Especially my mother.”

  His massive hand cupped the back of the small blond head and pressed it to him.

  “I’m going to find him, Karen. I promise you that. And I’m going to find out who killed the other ones, too. I haven’t had any luck yet but I think that’s going to change.”

  She leaned away from him, looked up into the handsome face. “Did you find out something?”

  “I don’t want to say anything just yet, Karen. I don’t want to have bad luck by talking about it.”

  Despite the situation, she smiled. That was another thing they always said about Tom Cain. Him and his damn superstitions.

  “Excuse me,” said the slim older deputy Pete Rule, coming through the door that separated the four cells in back from the front office. Rule wore a faded work shirt. A star was pinned to one of the pockets. There was a melancholy about Rule that Karen had always wondered about. Cain’s other deputies were basically gunslingers. She wondered why somebody as quiet and often gentle as Rule would have signed on. “Afternoon, Karen.”

  “Hello, Pete,” she said, slipping from Cain’s arms. She’d liked Rule ever since she’d seen him jump into a rushing river and pluck out a two-year-old girl who’d wandered into it.

  “We’ll find him, Karen,” Rule said. “That’s a promise.”

  Karen nodded, a bit embarrassed now that she’d been so angry.

  “You tell your mother she’s in my prayers,” Cain said.

  “Thanks for helping us. If you weren’t here—” She felt tears dampen her eyes again.

  “You better go get yourself one of those pieces of apple pie that Mrs. Gunderson’s serving over to the café for dinner tonight,” Cain said. “She snuck me a slice, and I’ll tell you, I felt better about things right away. And I suspect she’d let you take a piece home for your mother, too.”

  At the door, she said, “If you hear anything—”

  “We’ll be at your door ten seconds after we get any kind of word at all.”

  She nodded to each of them and then left.

  “I know one thing,” Rule said. “He ain’t alive. He’s just like them other two.”

  “Yeah,” Cain said, almost bitterly. “And when we find him, I’ll be the one who has to tell her.”

  A little girl in a dress made of feed sacks was the first resident of Cawthorne to see the body of Clete Byrnes. She had just finished shooing her little brother inside for supper when she turned at the sound of a horse and there, passing right by her tiny front yard, was a big man on a stallion just now entering the town limits. She knew that there was a man in the blanket tied across the horse because she could see his boots. She wondered if this was Clete Byrnes. Her dad knew Byrnes from the days when he’d worked out at the Bar DD. Byrnes was all her dad talked about at the supper table the past two nights. He said he figured Byrnes was dead but then her mother got mad and shushed him for saying that in front of the four children.

  She waved at the big man on the horse and he waved back. Then she ran inside to share her news.

  Cawthorne had once been nothing more than a cattle town, but these days it was a commercial hub for ranchers and farmers from all around. Fargo started seeing small, inexpensive houses right after he waved to the little girl. He traveled the main road from there into town. At indigo dusk, the stars already fierce, the mountain chill winterlike, he reached the three-block center of Cawthorne. Most of the false-fronted businesses had closed for the day but two cafés and four saloons were noisy as hell and obviously planned to stay that way.

  Every few yards somebody on the plank walk would stop to peer at him. There was a fair share of buggy, wagon, and horse traffic but somehow, even before they saw the blanket on the back of the Ovaro, they seemed to know that this was the horse everybody in town had been dreading to see.

  They had to wait until Fargo came closer to confirm what they suspected. Then they jerked a bit at the sight of the blanket or cursed under their breath or said a prayer.

  Fargo watched for a sign identifying the sheriff’s office. He had to pass by the saloons before reaching it. A couple of whores stood on the porches of their respective saloons. Fargo had known enough of them in his time—and had liked a hell of a lot of them—to know that these two had stepped out just to get away from the cloying stench and grubbing hands of life inside.

  The sheriff’s office was at the end of a block that fronted on a riverbank. The building was long, narrow, adobe. As he dismounted and started to tie the reins of his Ovaro to the hitching post, he turned to see shadow shapes in the gathering darkness. The word was out. Only a few of those in the business district knew about Clete Byrnes as yet but soon most of Cawthorne would. A half dozen shadow shapes hurried down the street toward Fargo. The first wave of ghouls.

  He walked up to the door and shoved it open. A gaunt man in a faded work shirt and a star came around the desk. “Everything all right?”

  Fargo noted that the man’s first instinct wasn’t to go for his gun. A good sign. Too many gun-happy lawmen around.

  “I’ve got a body out here. His papers said his name is Clete Byrnes.”

  “Oh, damn, that poor family of his. What happened to him?”

  “He was shot three times.”

  Fargo walked back out on the plank walk. By now twenty people had formed a semicircle around the Ovaro and its lifeless passenger. Men, women, even a pair of tow-headed kids who might have been twins. An elderly gentleman with a cane carried a smoky lantern that he held up to the corpse. “Did somebody say it’s Clete? I always knew that boy’d end up like this.”

  “Well, that’s a hell of a thing to say,” a woman wrapped in a black shawl snapped. “And I’ll remember it when we bury you, too. I’ll have some choice things to say then, myself.”

  A few of the people laughed, making the scene even stranger.

  The deputy shouted, “Now you get away from here and get on about your business.”

  “We got a right to be here, Pete. Same as you do.”

  “Is that right, Sam? I guess I can’t see your badge because it’s so dark. But maybe somebody made you a deputy without me knowing it. We need to sort this thing out.”

  “Who’s the one who brought him in?”

  The deputy offered Fargo his hand. “Pete Rule.”

  “Skye Fargo,” the Trailsman said as they shook.

  “Hey, I’ve heard of him!” one of the men said.

  “Now, c’mon, folks. This whole situation is bad enough. Just please go on about your business.”

  They left resentfully, calling Rule names as they shuffled away.

  Cold moonlight gave Rule enough of a look at the face of the corpse to know who he was seeing. “It’s Clete, all right.” He shook his head. “Third one in a month.”

  “Any idea if they’re connected?”

  “That’s what the sheriff is trying to figure out. They were friends, hell-raisers, but they never got into any serious trouble. That’s what makes this whole thing so damned strange. Who’d want to kill them?”

  From down the street came the clatter of a buckboard. All Fargo could see of the man driving it was a top hat. Who the hell would wear a top hat in a town like Cawthorne?