The Old Wolves

by Peter Brandvold

“Oh, I don’t know. ’Cause you’re good. You’re kind. You’re sweet as all git-out in bed, and you got a nice laugh. Your eyes twinkle, too, and I like that in a man. Most men are so serious.”

  “Well, I’m old enough to know you can’t take life too damn serious. Why would you? It’s too damn short!”

  Jane laughed and rubbed her head against his arm as they walked. “Spurr, I hope you come back an’ see me sometime.”

  “Ah, hell—you must be tired o’ my stringy hide by now.”

  “You’re a good man, Spurr. Sure, you got a few years on you, but . . .”

  Spurr stopped and looked at her. “What is it, Miss Jane?”

  She gazed up at him concernedly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay, hon?”

  “What is it?” he urged, patting her hand.

  “Spurr, ain’t you just a tad old to be doin’ what you’re doin’?”

  “Ah, hell,” Spurr said, twisting his leathery, patch-bearded, wart-stippled face like he’d just sucked a lemon. “Not you, too, Miss Jane.”

  “Last night, Spurr,” the girl said, “I woke up and you . . . you didn’t sound too good.”

  “Didn’t sound too good? Hell, I was probably snorin’!”

  “Well, between the snores your breath seemed to flutter a lot, like you were working at catching air.”

  “Ah, hell,” Spurr said, patting her hand reassuringly this time. “I was just tired. Drunk and tired. You ’bout wore me out, girl! But that’s all right. Gettin’ his ashes hauled good, by a real pro like yourself, adds year to an old man’s li. . . .”

  Spurr let his voice trail off and beetled his grizzled brows as he stared across the street, toward four horses standing at the tie rack in front of the old Territorial Bank of Denver—a small, wood-and-brick structure sandwiched between a furniture shop and Petersen’s Fine Watches & Watch Repair store.

  “What is it?” the girl asked, following his gaze toward where a man in rough-hewn trail gear leaned against the hitchrack, his back to Spurr and Jane. Spurr could see him between a piebald gelding and a black-legged steeldust stallion. The man wore a long, coarsely woven coat, and he had his head down as though scrutinizing something on the ground around his boots, which were casually crossed at the ankles.

  The horses were not tied. Spurr could see that the man leaning against the hitchrack was holding all four sets of reins in his hands.

  Spurr looked at the bank. The shades were drawn over the front windows and doors. That wasn’t unusual for this early in the day, but the horses standing out front of the place were damned unusual. As was the man standing a little too casually against the hitchrack, holding their reins.

  Just then the bank door opened. Faintly, Spurr heard the bell over the door jangle. The shade in the door’s window jostled. The door jerked as it stopped abruptly, as though running up against a boot, and then a man stumbled out—a hombre dressed in rough trail gear similar to that worn by the gent at the hitchrack. He was holding a pistol straight up in one hand, and the two men who followed him out of the bank were also holding pistols.

  Spurr released Jane’s arm and unsnapped the keeper thong over the hammer of the Starr .44 jutting butt forward on his left hip. Keeping his eyes on the three men hurrying out of the bank, he said quietly, with measured calm, “Jane, I want you to crouch down behind that rain barrel over there. Can you do that for me, please?”

  “But, Spurr, what . . . ?”

  “Now, Jane—hurry!”

  As Spurr turned back toward the bank, he saw a shadow move in the corner of his right eye. He jerked his head in that direction. A man was moving quickly out from a store front a half a block away, extending a pistol straight out in front of him. The pistol exploded as the man shouted, “Trouble, boys!”

  Jane, who had just started running up the street toward the rain barrel outside of a small grocery shop, had stepped between Spurr and the man with the gun at the same time that the gun roared. She gave a shrill scream as she jerked backward, got her shoe caught in a crack between the boards, and hit the walk with a heavy thud.

  “Jane!” Spurr yelled, extending his Starr straight out from his right shoulder. He hastily aimed at the man running toward him, yelling and shooting, smoke and flames lapping from the barrel of his six-shooter.

  Two slugs screamed around Spurr as the old lawman drew his left foot back, turning sideways to make himself a smaller target, and triggered the Starr twice quickly.

  Bam! Bam!

  He watched the man running toward him jerk his head back as his body flew to Spurr’s left where it ran into an awning support post. The shooter slid down against the post, clapping one hand to his chest and triggering his pistol into the boardwalk.

  “Jane!”

  Spurr started running toward where the girl lay faceup on the boardwalk six feet away from him. But when the men on the far side of the street began opening up on him, the roar of the revolvers echoing loudly off the buildings lining the narrow, shadowy street, Spurr wheeled and returned fire.

  The men were each taking their own horse’s reins and trying to get mounted. But the horses were screaming and fidgeting as the men triggered their pistols at Spurr. Their wild shots broke glass and thumped into building facades or awning support posts around the old lawman, who, down on one knee, quickly emptied the Starr.

  He pinked one of the bank robbers as the man was climbing onto his horse. The man yowled and clutched his right buttock and fell backward out of the saddle to hit the cinder-paved street, mewling.

  But Spurr did not see the man hit the street, because just then an invisible mule kicked him in the chest and threw him backward into a slight break between two business buildings.

  He lay flat on his back, gasping, his left arm feeling heavy and dead, the mule that kicked him now sitting on his chest. Time slowed down, as did his mind, and he fought to stay conscious and aware of what was going on across the street. As if from far away, he heard several more gun pops, and then he felt the reverberation of galloping hooves through his back.

  He felt naked, lying there, that invisible mule sitting on his chest, keeping him from dragging a full draught of air into his lungs. His vision blurred, dimmed, and his tongue grew thick and dry. Nausea caused his belly to contract, and he managed to roll onto his side as sour bile exploded up from his chest and splattered onto the spur-scarred, sun-silvered boardwalk.

  Then the morning light dimmed. He wasn’t sure, but he must have passed out for a time.

  He was drawn back to full consciousness by the sounds of men shouting and horses galloping. He lifted his head to see two Denver policemen approached the bank at a hard gallop, the city badge toters shouting and gesturing. As they pulled to skidding halts in front of the bank, the one nearest Spurr leapt out of the saddle of his long-legged bay, while the other ground the heels of his high, brown boots into his own bay’s flanks and continued south along Arapaho.

  The other policeman, attired in a blue, cavalry-like tunic with gold buttons, corduroy trousers, and a copper badge on his left breast, dropped his horse’s reins and, holding a Winchester carbine in one gloved hand, ran up on the boardwalk. His boots tattooed a frenetic rhythm as he hurried over to where Jane lay unmoving, her blond head nearest Spurr, her hair having fallen from the neat coronet she’d started the morning with.

  The cop knelt beside the girl, touched a finger to her neck.

  Spurr was grunting against the pain in his arm, shoulder, and chest as he lay on his side and looked at the cop. “She . . . ?”

  “Dead,” said the policeman, whose granitelike face and walrus mustache marked him as Mark Trumbo, ex-cavalryman and lieutenant on Denver’s sixteen-man police force. The man’s pewter brows beetled as he walked over to Spurr and stared down, incredulous.

  “Spurr?”

  Spurr stared at the girl in shock, unable to wrap his mind around all
that had just happened so quickly, so out of the blue.

  “Where you hit, Spurr?” Trumbo asked, dropping to one knee beside the old lawman.

  Spurr shook his head. He rolled onto his back. “Reach into my pocket . . . shirt pocket. Little bag in there.”

  Trumbo reached inside Spurr’s thigh-length elk-skin vest and hauled the small hide sack from the pocket of his hickory shirt. “This?”

  Spurr swallowed, licked his lips. “Take one o’ them pills out, stick it under my tongue.”

  “Heart?”

  Spurr nodded.

  Trumbo’s big fingers were awkward, but he managed to get the little bag open and shake one of the small, gelatin tablets into the palm of his hand. With his thumb and index finger, he plucked the pill out of his palm and, as Spurr opened his mouth and lifted his tongue, Trumbo set it inside the old lawman’s mouth.

  Spurr let the nitroglycerin tablet, prescribed by his doctor as the latest “heart-starting medicine,” dissolve under his tongue. As the nitro gently exploded in his chest, nudging his tucker and making it begin to beat more regularly, the mule eased itself up off Spurr’s sternum. The policeman was speaking to him, but Spurr wasn’t listening.

  His thoughts were with the girl, who’d taken a bullet meant for him.

  He heaved himself up onto all fours, crawled over to Jane, who lay staring through wide-open eyes at the sky while her tussled hair blew in the breeze around her pretty head.

  Her lips were spread, revealing her teeth, so that she almost appeared to be smiling.

  Blood puddled the simple, light brown dress she’d donned that morning to have breakfast at the Chinaman’s with the ragged old lawman.

  “Oh, darlin’,” Spurr said, sorrow racking him, as he gently took the girl’s young face in his hands, brushing his thumbs across her eyes, closing them. “Oh, my dear sweet, beautiful darlin’!”

  SIX

  Two weeks later, Spurr splashed whiskey into a tin cup and threw it back.

  He sighed, smacked his lips, and set the cup on the crude table he’d fashioned from a pine stump beside the bed in his two-room cabin on the slopes of Mount Rosalie. He lay his head back against his pillow and stared toward the front of the shack filled with brown shadows.

  It had been a warm day, and he’d propped his plank door open with a rock. Now the air was stitched with an autumnal chill. The light angling through it and through the low, sashed windows on each side of it, was touched with late-afternoon gold and speckled with dust motes.

  Night would be here soon. Spurr had gotten out of bed once to scrounge up a sandwich to go with the whiskey he’d been sipping since dawn, and once more to prop the door open with the rock.

  Outside, the dog who hung around the place started barking angrily. The sounds were harsh after an entire day filled with the peace and quiet of the bluffs and foothills rising toward the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and the vaulting, cobalt-blue, high-altitude sky. A long, quiet day now interrupted near its end by the barking of that damn dog whom Spurr called simply Dawg and who’d come out of nowhere and stayed around the place even when Spurr wasn’t here, which was damn near all the time, though that would likely change now.

  If they were going to cohabitate indefinitely, Spurr and Dawg needed to come to terms.

  “Goddamnit, Dawg, shut your consarned mouth and go rustle up a porky-pine!”

  The dog’s barks did not dwindle in the least. In fact, they grew even more frantic. And then Spurr realized why as his sharp ears picked up the ominous ratcheting hiss of a rattlesnake.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Spurr flung his single sheet back and dropped his stocking-clad feet to the floor. He rose with a heavy groan, feeling his ticker lurch in his chest, and then, clad in only the socks and his threadbare longhandles, shuffled over to his cluttered eating table. His Starr .44 sat on the table, beside a tin plate from which Dawg had earlier removed Spurr’s steak bone from last night and chewed it, growling and whining his satisfaction, on the front stoop.

  Spurr grabbed the .44, spun the cylinder, and shuffled out onto the stoop and stood over the grease spot that was all that remained of the bone.

  The dog was running in circles about thirty feet out from the stoop, in the yard that was large patches of clay-colored dirt between yucca and mountain sage plants. In the middle of the dog’s rotation, and the focus of its attention, was a coiled diamondback that was striking repeatedly while the dog, well accustomed to the perils of the wild, leapt back just out of the serpent’s reach.

  The dog—a black-and-brown shepherd mongrel with one shredded ear—had its hackles raised and was showing its teeth from which dripped the stringy foam of its wrath.

  “Get the hell out of the way, and I’ll shoot the son of a bitch!” Spurr shouted, stepping forward, blinking and pinching sleep out of his eyes. “Been needin’ meat for the stewpot anyways, and that damn viper nearly bit me two days ago when I was fetchin’ firewood. Get out of the way, you fool cur!”

  Spurr clicked the Starr’s hammer back. He waited for the snake to strike at Dawg once more, and to draw its head back to its coil, and fired.

  Dawg yelped and twisted around to look back at Spurr as the lawman’s slug plumed dust about six feet beyond the snake. The report took the starch out of the cur’s tail; it slunk about four feet back away from the snake. Not yet ready to let the serpent go despite the fool on the porch with the pistol, the dog lay belly down as it stared in dark frustration at the snake, whining deep in its shaggy chest.

  The snake lifted its flat, diamond-shaped head, slithering its forked tongue. Its copper eyes, with all the expression of steel pellets, turned toward the cur hunkered before it. Spurr’s Starr roared, and the head disappeared, leaving only a red, ragged end where the .44-caliber round had cleaved it from the body, thick as Spurr’s bony wrist.

  Even with its head gone, the snake tried to strike. The dog, horrified, leapt back with a yip and then, as the snake continued to writhe and whip its button tail, the dog stood about six feet away from it, shuttling its skeptical eyes from the viper to Spurr and back again.

  Spurr stared at the snake in wide-eyed surprise at the shot he’d just made. “Shit,” he said, looking at the smoking gun in his hand. “Did you see that, Dawg? That was one dog-gone good shot, wouldn’t you say, boy?”

  The dog mewled deep in its chest, regarded Spurr with one ear down, the shredded one half raised, tipped its head to one side, and then turned and slunk off for a pile of boulders sheathed in high, blond weeds and cedars, where it usually hunted for cottontails.

  Spurr chuckled, still amazed—“I haven’t made a shot like that in years!”—and walked down off the porch steps and into the yard. He ambled over to the snake that was still writhing wildly though its movements were gradually diminishing, and held the beast down with one of his stocking feet. He grabbed the viper just down from the ragged neck and held it up for inspection.

  “That’s a hog there!” he said, estimating the length to be around five and a half feet. “Throw him in a stew pot with some onions and pinto beans, and I’m gonna have me a meal!”

  He’d started walking back toward the cabin, the snake still slowly coiling and uncoiling in his hand, when a clattering rose behind him.

  He turned toward the west, where he could see, between a haystack butte and a rocky dike, the town of Denver spread out across the eastern plain about ten miles away. It didn’t look so big from here and this high vantage—just a rather motley collection of red and black or brown buildings and stock pens surrounding a business section a little larger and more sprawling than Dodge City’s or Wichita’s, with the English castle–like Union Station standing watch over the silver rails of the Union Pacific, formerly the Denver Pacific, and a few other lines that were converging now on Denver and making it a right smart hub.

  Heading from the direction of town, now just vis
ible as it climbed the incline from the plains and was turning around a rocky-topped butte, was a spiffy-looking two-seater buggy upholstered in black leather and appointed with high, red wheels.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Spurr said, narrowing his eyes speculatively, as he watched the buggy come along the shaggy, two-track trail angling like a long, flour-white snake through the pinyons and junipers and shin-high brome and needle grass spotted with the soft pinks and velvet blues of autumn wildflowers.

  One man was driving the one-horse rig while another lounged in the seat behind him, to the buggy’s far right side, holding a newspaper open before him. Spurr couldn’t see much of the buggy’s passenger except for a pearl-gray derby hat, but he recognized the driver, and that alone—as well as the fancy buggy—told him who was on his way for a visit. The driver was Chief Marshal Henry Brackett’s first assistant, Leonard Foghorn, a graduate of Yale University and a member of some moneyed clan from the same rolling, green Maryland hills that the chief marshal himself hailed from.

  When a fellow saw Leonard Foghorn—a well set-up lad in his early twenties and always dressed to the nines in a crisp, carefully tailored seersucker suit—you knew the Chief Marshal wasn’t far behind. Henry Brackett wasn’t now, either—only about three feet away from his blond, pink-cheeked assistant, reading the Rocky Mountain News while the buggy jostled him along the uneven two-track.

  “Well, this has got to be bad—real bad,” Spurr said after young Leonard had turned a broad circle in the yard and pulled the buggy sideways in front of Spurr, dust wafting in the salmon light. “I think in all the years we’ve worked together, Henry, you’ve been out here only once. On a huntin’ trip.”

  Long ago, Spurr and the chief marshal had dispensed with formalities. They each addressed the other by his first name. Brackett was only two years older than Spurr, after all, and they’d worked together as deputies before Henry had been promoted to the chief marshal position about fifteen years before, when he was still a relatively young man. At least, younger than the old man he was now.