As Spurr turned and walked through the door and stepped over the dead men in the street, he heard Burke say behind him, “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary—that’s just bloody wonderful!”
ELEVEN
Spurr stabled Cochise in a livery barn he’d seen on his way into town, leaving his prized roan in the hands of the black liveryman, Mortimer Lang, who assured Spurr the mount would get the best care in all the Rocky Mountains. Lang smiled broadly and held out his gloved hand for Spurr to drop several coins into.
For grub, Lang recommended the tent shack next door to the livery barn. For sleep, Lang said the man who owned the grub shack also had cribs behind the place, with cots as comfortable as any bed in Diamond Fire.
“The bedbugs there don’t bite as hard as elsewhere around here,” Lang said, chuckling as he led Cochise into the barn’s musky shadows.
Spurr walked down the wooden ramp and into the street. There were all brands of commotion up and down the narrow canyon housing the perdition of Diamond Fire, with bonfires burning here and there and shunting weird shadows of reveling men and women. The town reminded Spurr of a circus, as did most mining camps he’d visited. The raucous, darkly festive air about the place was that of a short-lived party. Soon, when the gold played out, the camp would go bust and all the revelers would be hitting the trail for other opportunities.
Spurr didn’t recognize a man’s anguished groan for what it was until he started walking into the small, log-frame tent shack just west of the livery barn. The groan got louder, echoing above the din, and Spurr turned to see a man walking out of a little gray cabin on the other side of the canyon.
By the light of a fire burning near the small stoop of the cabin, whose large shingle over the front door read simply BEER AND SANDWICHES, Spurr saw the man stumble out the front door, slamming the door back against the cabin’s front wall. He was clamping his hands over his belly from which what appeared to be a knife protruded.
The flames shone on the knife’s dark, silver-capped handle.
The man—hatless, wearing a striped blanket coat—dragged his boot toes out onto the stoop, spurs chinging on the floorboards. He stumbled down the stoop’s three steps, dropped to his knees in the street, and fell face forward in the dirt and gravel. He lay jerking with death spasms.
The men and the few women in the area didn’t pay much attention to the fast-dying gent. A big man and a copper-haired woman were fornicating against the wall of the next building over from the beer and sandwich place. The man held the woman up against the building, her bare legs wrapped around his waist, and he was hammering his bare hips against her, bobbing her up and down.
His pants were bunched around his ankles and tall miner’s boots. His bare white ass jerked back and forth. The woman’s dress was pulled up to her waist. A high-heeled shoe dangled off one of her feet grinding into his back. The other shoe lay on the ground near the miner’s feet.
The big, fornicating miner merely glanced over his shoulder at the man and then continued diddling the grunting woman.
As Spurr watched, another man strode through the same door as the dying man. He was tall and lean, and he wore a wolf vest over a plaid shirt. He calmly descended the porch steps, kicked the now-still gent over onto his back, planted a boot on the man’s right hip, and jerked the blade out of his belly.
The man wiped the blade off on the dead man’s pants then held it up to inspect it, making sure he’d cleaned it thoroughly, and slipped the knife into the sheath on his left hip. The tall man looked around slowly.
If he saw Spurr staring at him from across the streambed, he didn’t show it. He merely swung around, mounted the porch steps, and ducking his head under the low doorway, disappeared inside the beer and sandwich place.
Spurr looked at the dead man. He supposed he should do something about the killing, but he had no inclination. He was tired, and when you got down to brass tacks, the murder was not in his jurisdiction. True, there was no lawman here in Diamond Fire at the moment, so that officially made the killing his business, but he was dead-dog tired.
His heart felt heavy and sore in his chest.
He should look into it, but this was his last assignment, and he just wasn’t going to do it. He was going to pad out his belly with grub and whiskey-laced coffee and roll up in a mattress sack. He needed a good night’s rest before lighting out on the western trail toward Cameron Pass again tomorrow.
He ducked through the tent shack’s flap. There were three long tables and benches, not enough lanterns hanging from low beams to keep a man from tripping as he walked to a table.
Only one of the tables was occupied by two old, long-bearded salts hunkered over their plates and eating in silence. As Spurr sat down at a table right of the graybeards, a black man looked through a curtained doorway at the back.
“Supper?” he called to Spurr.
“That’s why I’m here. Coffee. Whiskey, too, if you got it.”
The black man said, “Fifty cents a shot for the good stuff. Twenty-five for the bad.” He was a little older and heavier than the black man in the livery barn, but they otherwise owned similar features.
Spurr chuckled at the family operation and wagged his head at the cost of the tangleleg. But this far up in the high and rocky, beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Bring me the bad stuff,” he said, allowing for his soon-to-be dwindling income.
A minute later, the black man—round faced, early thirties—brought out a plate of pork roast, potatoes and gravy, boiled greens, and a hot cross bun, and set it on the table before Spurr. He set a bottle and tin cup on the table.
“You look like an honest man,” said the black man. “I’ll trust you to count your shots.”
He rolled a sharpened stove match from one side of his mouth to the other and pinned Spurr with a stern look.
“Bad luck to cheat a trusting man,” Spurr said and popped the cork on the half-full bottle. “Your brother said you got some cots out back.”
“Cousin.”
“All right.” Spurr poured whiskey into the cup. “Which leg you want for a good night’s sleep?”
“Keep your leg, mister. Cots are fifty cents.”
“Well, that’s reasonable.”
When the man went away, Spurr ate the good food hungrily. He imbibed four shots, hoping like hell he’d still have some money to get him down to Mexico. He didn’t want to get hung up anywhere in between and die in some snowy mountain range, wolves gnawing at his old, withered limbs.
Damnit, he deserved to go out better than that.
“But now you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, you miserable cuss,” Spurr said under his breath as, his plate cleaned, he look into the remaining whiskey at the bottom of the cup. “You have not lived well. You’ve trifled away your years. You could be in Mexico by now, with a good woman who almost loved you, if you hadn’t been so damn afraid of death that you clung to your job as though it were life itself. Damn fool!”
He was thinking of a particular woman, a pretty, aging percentage gal who called herself Abilene. Spurr had called her “Texas” for kicks and giggles. He’d known her down in Texas and then he’d seen her again in Wyoming. They’d talked half seriously, half drunkenly of running away together, but Spurr had lit out after outlaws and never got around to returning for her.
The last time he’d seen her, she’d been married to an old rancher from the southern Big Horns.
“Damn fool!”
“What the hell’s the matter with you, mister?”
Spurr looked at the two graybeards sitting on the far side of the long table to his left. They were both scowling at him. The one who’d spoken to him squinted his washed-out eyes inside his beard and said, “Which one of us you callin’ a fool?”
The other one pounded the end of his fist on the table. “You’re the damn fool!”
“That’s ri
ght—I am a damn fool.”
“Then what you’re callin’ us fools for?” asked the man who’d first taken umbrage.
“I wasn’t. I was . . . ah, hell.” Spurr threw his whiskey back and slammed the cup back down on the table. “Go to hell, both of ya!”
He rose from his table, feeling low-down mean and angry though the two graybeards had nothing to do with it. If he were twenty years younger, he’d go looking for a fight. But his chest ached and he was tired from the ride and from killing, and he was downright frightened, too. He’d ridden into a job up here he hadn’t been expecting—one that was much larger than either Henry Brackett or even he, himself, thought he was capable of seeing to a satisfactory conclusion.
This job that was supposed to be routine. His last job that was supposed to have given him something else to think about besides the girl who’d taken a bullet meant for him.
“What the hell’s going on here?” the black man said, stepping out from behind the rear curtain, wiping his hands on a towel. “Can’t you three get along? Look how old you all are!”
Spurr laughed at that. He’d thought the graybeards were older than he, but now, upon closer scrutiny, he saw that they were probably around his age. They returned his look with owly, indignant looks of their own. If he and they were about thirty years younger, they’d likely be throwing chairs and fists about now, none of them knowing why.
Spurr laughed at that notion, too. He was just drunk on the whiskey and altitude and the general nonsense of life. He was needing a bed bad.
“What do I owe you?” Spurr asked the black man.
The black man figured the charge for the meal and the whiskey and then he added on the fifty cents for the cot. Spurr paid him, gathered his gear and his rifle, and left through the rear kitchen where a black woman was scrubbing pans, her hair in her eyes.
Another tent lay directly behind the rear one, a little black boy perched on a stool beside the pucker. He wore a wool watch cap, a thick gray scarf around his neck, and a man’s ragged wool dress coat that sagged on his shoulders. He clutched a lidded wooden box in his lap.
The boy held out his wool-gloved hand. Two of the fingers were worn so that his fingers showed through. “That’ll be one dollar, mister.”
Spurr scowled. “What’s that?”
“Cots are one dollar.”
“Oh, are they? Well, I heard they were fifty cents. In fact, that’s just what I paid your pa in yonder!”
The kid jerked his hand impatiently. “Fifty cents in there, fifty cents out here. And he’s my uncle.”
Spurr laughed and shook his head. He was too tired to argue even if he’d had the gumption to argue with a shaver with holes in his gloves. He slapped two coins into the kid’s hand and pulled the cloth cap down over the kid’s eyes.
The boy laughed. Spurr chuckled and pushed through the pucker and into the hotel tent. There were eight or so rickety cots along either side of a narrow alley. Only three cots were taken, it still being early. They’d no doubt fill up fast around midnight.
Spurr chose one farthest away from the snoring men as he could get, dumped his gear on the floor, and undressed as quickly as his popping bones would allow. Outside, a gun cracked.
Spurr jumped.
There were two more pops followed by another as though in afterthought. The shots had come from a long ways away. They were followed by muffled shouting.
Spurr sighed and, clad in only his balbriggans and socks, sagged onto the edge of the cot. Such commotion likely went on all night. His heart fluttered. His nerves were shot. He was exhausted. He’d be glad to get back out on the trail tomorrow, even in the company of a notorious old outlaw trailed by the outlaw’s savage gang.
He rolled up in the flea-bit blanket, turned onto his side. “Spurr, you retired one job too late, didn’t you?” he rasped to himself.
He drew a long, deep breath, let his lids slide down over his eyes.
He was asleep before he realized it—long, deep, and dreamless. Only a couple of times did he rouse even slightly when other men came in to undress and to claim the empty cots around him.
When he woke fully, it was to the loud, ratcheting click of a gun hammer and the cold barrel of a pistol pressed against his forehead.
TWELVE
Spurr opened his eyes and stared up past the cocked pistol pressed against his head to the rugged, bearded face glaring down at him. The man’s own eyes widened as though in shock, and he stitched his black brows together.
“You ain’t Albert.”
“No, I ain’t,” Spurr said, his voice raspy from sleep. “If you don’t remove that gun from my face in the next second, you best go ahead and use it.”
The bearded man pulled the pistol back, tipped the barrel up, and depressed the hammer. “Sorry, amigo.” He shook his head, chuckled wryly. “I almost shot the wrong man.”
He straightened, turned away, dropped the hogleg back into its holster on his right hip, and walked away through the thick, purple morning shadows. Men snored around him, one grinding his teeth and wheezing.
Spurr rose to his elbows and stared at the man walking away from him until the man had ducked out through the tent’s front pucker. Then the old lawman blinked for the first time that morning, smacked his lips, and ran a hand down his face, pinching the sleep from his eyes with thumbs and index fingers.
He shook his head, noted the gradual slowing of his heart that had commenced to beating a war drum in his chest when he’d awakened to the pistol and the glaring eyes. He chuckled, a little giddy. That had been close.
But then, this was a mining camp, really no woolier than most—he remembered hearing guns popping last night in his sleep—and mining camps didn’t place much value on a man’s life. There was damned little civility, which was refreshing in some ways, downright horrifying in others.
Well, time to hit the trail. The silence and solitude of the open mountains beckoned. He just hoped he could enjoy it with Boomer Drago in tow.
Spurr threw the wool blanket back and immediately noticed the steely chill in the air as he dropped his feet to the floor, which was bare ground with tufts of sage growing here and there amongst the prickly gravel. From somewhere nearby, beneath the snoring, he could hear the scratching of a rodent, probably a pocket mouse.
Spurr took his time dressing. Over the past several years, it had taken him longer and longer to wake up in the mornings and he never really came around until he’d had a mug of black coffee with a jigger or two of whiskey in it. When he’d gotten his boots on, and had donned his hat, he sat down on the cot, fished around in his saddlebags until he found his hide-covered traveling flask, and took a generous pull.
The prickly heat washed down inside him, and blossomed throughout his being, smoothing out the ratcheting in his feeble heart. He returned the flask to his saddlebags, strapped his Starr and his cartridge belt around his waist, pulling his hickory shirt tight across his slight paunch and stuffing it into his wash-worn canvas trousers.
His rifle in his right hand, saddlebags draped over his left shoulder, he made his way on out of the hotel tent to the restaurant tent, and indulged in a hearty breakfast of flapjacks, ham, and pinto beans, with a cup of a coffee and a jigger of the proprietor’s expensive, rotgut whiskey. He’d save his own for the trail back down to Denver.
He’d likely need it.
With his belly padded and his ticker ticking with a relative and pleasingly noticeable lack of discomfort, he dropped coins onto the table, gathered his gear, retrieved his horse from the liveryman, and rode on over to the jail. He was pleased to see a saddled horse—a stocky bay—tied to the hitchrack fronting the stoop.
Burke was inside, building another fire in the stove while Boomer Drago berated him for the chill. Drago’s breath plumed through the bars of the cell door.
“Spurr, I protest my mistreatment here in Diamond
Fire. I didn’t sleep a damn wink last night. This son of a bitch, the friggin’ Tooth Fairy, done banked the fire and left. Only, he must have banked it with green wood, because it went out an hour later without ever workin’ up any heat!”
Spurr closed the jailhouse door behind him.
Burke stood, slapping his hands together, and closed the stove door with a metallic clang. He turned the squeaky latch handle, and favored Spurr with a pleading look.
“Please, get him out of here—I beg you.”
“About that, Spurr,” Drago said, directing his gaze to the old lawman standing in front of the plankboard door. “I hope you had time to think it over real good. My gang will be showin’ up here any time now.” He shook his one-eyed head darkly. “When they do, you sure don’t wanna be here. There’ll be hell to pave an’ no hot pitch!”
Spurr looked at Burke. “Do you have any confirmation his gang really is headed this way, Mr. Mayor?”
Burke shook his head. “Just his word.”
Spurr chuckled. “You know what I think, Boomer? I think you’re just an old wolf that your gang done kicked out of the pack. I don’t think they’re comin’ after you at all. I think you an’ me are gonna have a nice, quiet, easy ride all the way down the mountains to the railroad and on into Union Station. Nice an’ quiet. Maybe we can even do some catchin’ up.”
Spurr glanced at Burke. “Open the door. Let him out of there.” He removed a pair of handcuffs from his coat pocket, and tossed them to the sitting mayor of Diamond Fire. “Throw those on him.”
“Hold on, now!” Drago snarled. A red scarf was tied over the top of his ragged bowler, over his ears, knotted under his chin. “I ain’t had breakfast yet. I ain’t even had a cup of coffee. My old ticker don’t get goin’ until I’ve slurped down a cup o’ mud!”
“Don’t make me tear up, now, Boomer. It’s so cold in here my eyes’ll likely freeze open!” Spurr gave the dentist another impatient nod. “Get him out of there, Burke. We’re burnin’ daylight.”
The Old Wolves Page 9
