The Old Wolves

by Peter Brandvold

  In the vestibule between the cars, he sat down with his back to the wall of the car he’d left, his saddlebags on one side of him, his rifle resting across his thighs, and relit the cheroot.

  The air whooshed past him on both sides of the gap between the cars, dragging smoke from the locomotive along with it. Spurr stared out across the prairie to the purple mountains, smoking and thinking over the long years behind him—long years that had rushed past faster than the prairie sliding past him toward Denver now—and he was glad when the train came to a jerking halt at the water stop and the little station hut on the open prairie east of Camp Collins.

  While the locomotive took on water and the conductor and one of the brakemen smoked and talked with the old black man who ran the depot hut in the shade of the hut’s little brush arbor, Spurr led Cochise down the wooden ramp from the stable car and tightened the roan’s saddle cinch.

  “Where you off to this time, Spurr?”

  The old lawman turned to see the old black man, Sebastian Polly, walk toward him from the station hut, puffing the quirley he held between his lips with a gnarled, arthritic right hand. The sideburns running down from the blue uniform cap were steel-colored, as was Polly’s thick mustache, with only a few threads of black showing through the gray.

  “You mean, for the last time, Sebastian,” Spurr said. For as long as Spurr had been a federal badge toter, Sebastian Polly had been living out here on this backside of nowhere east of Camp Collins, sixty miles south of Cheyenne.

  Polly lived in the station hut, and Spurr couldn’t remember ever stopping at this point and not seeing the black man here, tending the hut that saw business only when the train stopped to take on water or to let a passenger off. There had been a stage line through here, years ago, and Polly had run the relay station, but of course the stage line had closed when the Union Pacific connected Denver with the Northern Pacific line at Cheyenne. That’s when Polly went to work for the railroad and moved into the depot hut.

  Over the years, the black man’s hair had gradually turned grayer, and he’d grown a little thinner, his molasses eyes a little rheumier, his shoulders clad in the age-coppered blue uniform coat a little more stooped.

  “What you talkin’ about, Spurr?” Polly said, blowing out a plume of cigarette smoke and knitting his grizzled brows together.

  “This is it for me.” Spurr slipped Cochise’s bridle bit through the horse’s teeth and then grabbed his rifle from where it leaned against the wooden loading ramp slanting down from the stable car. “Last job. I done been retired.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “I said it.”

  Spurr slid his rifle into his beaded elk-hide scabbard and then tossed his saddlebags over Cochise’s back, tucking them under his bedroll around which his heavy buckskin mackinaw was tied, to hold the bags in place. He’d soon be climbing into high, cold, rough country.

  “You don’t look too happy about it, Spurr,” said Sebastian Polly, scowling, flicking ashes from his cigarette onto the cinder bed and rubbing the sparks out with his boot so as not to start any wild prairie fires.

  “Who could be happy about retirement, Sebastian?”

  “Well, shit, I will be . . . when my time comes. I reckon I got another year to go, and then I’ll have me a stake big enough to go live down in Denver and watch all them pretty girls walk by.”

  “Watch ’em all walk by, huh?” Holding Cochise’s reins in one gloved hand, Spurr turned to the old man. “Is that good enough for you? Just sittin’ out on some rooming house porch and watchin’ ’em all walk by?”

  Polly tipped his head to one side, his dark eyes curious. “Spurr, how old are you?”

  “I’m sixty-three, give or take a year. Record keeping wasn’t valued much over where they hatched me out.”

  “Well, shit, that’s five years older’n me. You ask me, you done pretty well. You should be stompin’ with your tail up in celebration of all them good years you put in, huntin’ bad men. Lawd knows there’s damn few lawmen been workin’ as long as you have without they ended up, long time ago, in a boot hill somewhere, worms in their mouth, pushin’ up crocuses every spring!”

  The station agent laughed at that.

  “Well, you’re just an optimistic man, aren’t you, Sebastian?”

  “Yes, sir, I am! Spurr, you got no cause to go ’round lookin’ like some dog headin’ back to the farm after getting’ hisself sprayed by a damn skunk! Time for you to move out of that old shack of yours and move into a nice roomin’ house in Denver.”

  Spurr turned a stirrup out and grunted as he poked his left foot through it. He heaved himself up onto Cochise’s back, the leather squawking beneath him. He said with a snort, “And sit out on the porch and just watch them purty girls stroll by, eh, Sebastian!”

  “Sho ’nuff, Mister Spurr. You try to whip them girls with your trouser snake, your old ticker’d plum go out on you!”

  “That’s what you think. Whippin’ girls with my trouser snake is what’s been keepin’ me so young.”

  “Then how come you’re so old?”

  Spurr leaned out from his horse and said as though conferring a deep secret, “Looks can be deceiving, Sebastian.”

  He grinned and straightened in his saddle, ignoring the tightness in his chest he was still feeling occasionally after the seizure on Arapaho Street in Denver that awful day.

  “I’ll be seein’ you once more, Sebastian. On my way back through. That’ll be the last you see of me. I’ll be headin’ on down to Mexico to whip the senoritas with my ole trouser snake while I dig for gold!”

  He neck-reined Cochise around and ground his heels into the big roan’s flanks, loping off along the old army trail to the west.

  “Spurr, somethin’ tells me you think you’re gonna live forever,” Sebastian said behind him, blowing smoke out his long, mahogany nostrils. “You ain’t got the word, have you? We all gonna dahhh!”

  Spurr scowled over his shoulder at the old gent who was way too pleased with himself. Sebastian poked a gnarled finger at him, jeering, and he showed his old, yellow teeth under his gray mustache, raising one thigh to slap it, his guffaws staying with Spurr as the old lawman galloped on down the trail to the west, toward the purple and lime-green mountains humping tall above the horizon.

  Spurr snarled, cursed under his breath, and spat to one side.

  “You just keep laughin’ like a mule with a mouthful of cockleburs, Sebastian!”

  He was so angry that he did not look back again. If he had, he would have seen three men leading their horses down the stock car’s loading ramp and staring after him.

  EIGHT

  “That’s him, all right,” Collie Bone said, staring after the old man who’d just ridden off on the rangy roan stallion, heading toward the mountains.

  “You sure, Bone?” This from a Wyoming outlaw named Quinn McCall, who was leading his bay Arab down the ramp alongside Bone.

  Both men gained the ground alongside the gravel bed of the railroad tracks, both staring off into the dust kicked up by the old man and the handsome roan. Behind Bone and McCall, the outlaw known only as Tatum to anyone who’d known him in the past ten years came down off the ramp at a trot, holding the headstall of his frisky ex-cavalry sorrel, who’d had one ear half chewed off.

  “That’s ole Spurr, all right,” Tatum said. “I recognized him when he looked right at me, when he boarded the flyer at Union Station.”

  “He looked right at you?”

  “Looked right at me,” Tatum said, “but I could tell he didn’t recognize me. My god, has he gotten old! Looks like a side of coyote-chewed mule deer buck behind that scraggly beard and them old duds that hang off his ancient bones. Got more age spots and warts than freckles.”

  Tatum threw a stirrup up over his saddle to tighten the sorrel’s cinch.

  “Spurr Morgan—well, I’ll be damne
d,” said McCall, lifting his funnel-brimmed Stetson to run a hand through his thick, close-cropped, copper-red hair. He wore a thick beard of the same color. “I hope he remembers us. You think he remembers us, Collie?”

  “Hope so. Don’t matter.” Collie Bone was setting his saddlebags over his horse, behind his saddle cantle and bedroll, and staring after Spurr. “He cost all three of us six years in Yuma pen. I woulda hunted that old man down, but, shit, I thought for sure he’d be dead by now. Ain’t that what we heard, Tatum? Didn’t we hear he bought a bullet in Nueces?”

  “I can’t vouch for what you heard, Collie, but that’s what I heard, all right. I remember cryin’ real tears, that night, too. Right in front of a rather expensive Abilene whore, too. Very embarrassing. I’m gonna give him one bullet for that when we run him down, in addition to all the others for Yuma.”

  “One bullet for every month,” McCall said, gritting his teeth as he stared after the small, brown, jostling blur that was the old lawman and his handsome roan. “Or until he dies howlin’. How’d that be?”

  He grunted angrily as he shucked his double-action Cooper Pocket Revolver, an old cap-and-ball weapon, but one that McCall still always carried with two other more modern weapons because it was a double-action piece and had sentimental value in that it had seen him through his early days on the frontier just after the Civil War.

  He quickly checked the loads in the Cooper and was about to check the loads in one of his matched Remingtons when a deep, resonate voice said, “Where you fellas headin’ off to in such a hurry?”

  Tatum, Bone, and McCall turned toward the station agent—a gray-haired, gray-mustached black man who’d been smoking in the shade of a large, dusty cottonwood slouched just west of the stopped train. He was strolling toward them slowly, rolling a quirley in his long, arthritic fingers.

  Beyond him, several young children played along the rails, running after each other and yelling—two boys and a younger girl, while a young woman in a Mother Hubbard dress and matching bonnet stood nearby, cradling an infant in her arms. Several men stood beyond the woman, smoking and conversing, just waiting for the order to reboard.

  Tatum hefted the Remington in his right hand and said, “Ain’t no one ever told you not to ask questions, you dark-skinned old son of a bitch?”

  The old man stopped and scowled at the three men standing by their horses. “I reckon I’m old enough to ask any questions I want.”

  “That a fact?” Tatum held his pistol in the flat of his hand as he walked slowly toward the old station agent, holding the gun up menacingly.

  “That’s enough, Tatum. Take that hump out of your neck.” Collie Bone, the unofficial leader of the outlaw trio, swung up onto his buckskin, and gave Tatum a commanding look. “We got other fish to fry, my friend.”

  “Any o’ them fish named Marshal Spurr Morgan?” the black man asked darkly.

  “What’s that to you?” asked McCall, stepping up onto his bay Arab. “What if it is about Spurr?”

  The station agent slowly, thoughtfully licked the cylinder he’d just pressed closed. “Spurr’s old and feeble,” he said, shaking is head gravely. “Why, he hardly recognized me, an’ we been friends for years. Bad ticker, too. He’s on his last job now, an’ then he’s headin’ for Mexico.”

  “That right?” Tatum chuckled. “Well, he should’ve headed for Mexico last week. ’Cause it as it turns out this here is the last week of his . . .”

  “Tatum!” Collie Bone jerked his chin toward the sorrel. “Fork leather an’ let’s ride!”

  Grinning shrewdly, Tatum did as Bone had bid, while Bone jutted his spade-shaped chin carpeted in a thick black goatee at the old station agent. “And you, old man, best keep your mouth shut from now on—understand? Otherwise, you’re gonna wake up some night in that shed yonder screamin’ and just so damn surprised to see your tongue hangin’ off the blade o’ my bowie knife!”

  The black man lowered his hands to his sides and shook his head. “Please, leave him be. Leave Spurr be. He ain’t half the man he once was.”

  “Smoke your cigarette, you old darkie!” McCall snarled as he booted his Arab after Bone, who’d put his buckskin into a ground-eating gallop up the wagon trail toward Camp Collins.

  “Oh, please, leave that feeble old man alone,” beseeched the station agent, staring after them, his eyes wide with concern.

  As the three obvious long-coulee riders dwindled to blurs kicking up a single dust trail, Sebastian Polly lit his freshly rolled quirley and grinned through the smoke.

  * * *

  “That old goat keeps a steady pace—I’ll give him that,” Bone said as he and the others followed a northward bend in the trail.

  “Probably too senile to know what he’s doin’ to his horse.” Tatum was checking the loads in one of his Remingtons again, which he did obsessively.

  “Maybe he just has a good horse,” said Bone, glancing toward Camp Collins, which lay to the north, off the trail’s right side—a shabby collection of mud-brick, brush-roofed dwellings languishing in the prairie sun. Since the Indian trouble had become almost nonexistent, the stockade-less encampment was now garrisoned by twenty to thirty soldiers at a time. These days, Bone had heard that desertion was the outpost’s biggest problem. That, prairie fires, drunkenness, and syphilis.

  The camp’s flag looked washed out and dirty in the bright sun, buffeting in the cool, dry breeze of the barren parade ground a half a mile from the main trail.

  “Maybe he ain’t worth it, fellas.” McCall leaned forward to light a cigar while holding his Arab to a spanking trot just behind the others. “If his mind is gone, like the darkie said it was, what’s the damn point? We’d best head on to Cheyenne, maybe. Bill and the others is gonna wonder what’s keepin’ us.”

  “Bill can wait,” Tatum said. “You know how many times I was bit by sewer roaches in the ole Hell Hole? One mornin’ I even woke to one sitting on my chest trying to chew out the food between my teeth!” He gave a shudder, shook his head. “No, sir—that ole bastard is gonna pay for that. I’m gonna pop a .44 pill into both his knees for that.”

  “Tatum’s right,” Bone said. “I couldn’t sleep a wink from now on if I knew I had a chance to kill ole Spurr Morgan and didn’t take it. You know how many men have wanted to do that over the years?”

  “Well, it would have been more satisfyin’ a few years ago,” McCall said. “When he coulda remembered what he was gettin’ turned under slow for, but what the hell. I reckon you boys are right.”

  He tipped his hat brim low and held the bay at a steady pace beside Bone, who kept his gaze straight ahead along the trail. He didn’t like it that, aside from the fresh prints in the trail left on the wagon track, he could not see the old lawman riding ahead of them. Spurr had a wily reputation. He was liable to pull a bushwhack. At least, a younger Spurr would have done that. The old man he and Tatum and McCall had seen aboard the train was a used-up old shell of his former self.

  Hell, he probably didn’t even remember where he was heading most of the time but merely left it up to his horse to get him there.

  Bone, Tatum, and McCall held up once when, smelling a coffee fire on the wind, they suspected that Spurr had taken a break probably to rest himself as well as his horse. When they saw the man ride out from a copse of willows along the Cache la Poudre River, they mounted their own rested horses and rode on.

  They followed Spurr’s trail north along the Poudre and into the mouth of Poudre Canyon—a wide gap between limestone and sandstone peaks cut by the river tumbling down from ten-thousand-foot Cameron Pass eons ago.

  Bone knew that the canyon was one of the few routes from the eastern plains to both the Never Summer Mountains south of the pass and the Medicine Bow Mountains to the north of it. Spurr must be heading into one of those ranges, though why the marshals service would send a man as old as Spurr into that rugged country was anyone’
s guess.

  Why in the hell was he still wearing a badge, anyway? He must have caught the governor with his pants down in the company of some other mucky-muck’s young wife.

  Bone smiled at that as he and the others rode up into the cooler climbs of the canyon, the river rippling through its rocky bed on the trail’s left side—a slow-moving stream this time of year though Bone, who’d once ridden the pass preying on stagecoach lines, knew that in the spring, when the snowmelt plunged down from the pass fifty miles west, it could be one hell of a mighty torrent.

  Bone and the other two men rode up the canyon until well after sunset, stopping when they spied the glow of a campfire off the trail’s right side, in some trees along the river. They picketed their horses well off the trail, shucked their rifles from their saddle scabbards, quietly pumped fresh rounds into the breeches, and slowly made their way toward the fire’s glow.

  The glow dwindled gradually as they approached the bivouac.

  Bone looked around carefully, wary of a bushwhack. As he and the others drew within forty yards of the camp in a small clearing amongst pines and aspens, Bone started hearing something. Low, regular snores.

  Bone couldn’t help smiling at that. He cut his eyes to the other two men—McCall moving slowly about ten yards to his left, Tatum moving about fifty yards straight out on his right.

  They glanced back at him. By the wan glow of the slowly dying fire, Bone could see Tatum curl his upper lip. The light danced in McCall’s narrowed eyes, beneath his down-canted hat brim. Bone’s heart quickened. He thought of the Hell Hole again, and he almost slavered like a wolf with the scent of an imminent kill in his nose.

  He looked around for Spurr’s horse but saw no sign of the mount. It must have been picketed near the river—probably hobbled so it could drink and forage at will. The mount would be a nice appropriation. Bone and his two partners would draw straws for it. A second mount—especially one as fine as the roan—would come in handy.