Ralph Compton: West of the Law

by Ralph Compton

  For the most part the wagon trail skirted the aspen groves. Only once had trees been hacked down to clear a path over a humpbacked ridge that led down to a broad and pleasant meadow strewn with wildflowers. A stream bordered by cottonwoods and willows angled across the flat, bubbling clear over a bed of pebbles.

  McBride and Prescott sat their horses at the top of the ridge and looked down at the valley. ‘‘Good a place as any to stop and boil up coffee and eat,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘There’s some salt pork left, but after that, we’ll have to shoot our own grub.’’

  They rode down the slope and reached the creek.

  That was when the smell hit them. ‘‘Something dead,’’ Prescott said, his nose lifted to the tainted air. ‘‘Maybe an antelope. Now and then coyotes can pull one down that’s old or sick.’’

  ‘‘Where the hell is it coming from?’’ McBride asked, talking through pursed lips, the cloying sweetness of death in his nostrils.

  ‘‘Further ahead of us. I only hope wherever the critter is, it’s not in the water.’’

  McBride’s mustang, which up until now had taken little interest in its surroundings, lifted its head, ragged ears pricked forward. Prescott’s big black was up on its toes, tossing its head as it fought the bit.

  Prescott’s blue eyes scanned the tree line along the creek, his face showing concern. With a wild animal’s instinct for danger he slid his Winchester out of the scabbard and racked a round into the chamber.

  ‘‘I think we’ve got a dead man ahead of us,’’ he said, turning to McBride. ‘‘And where’s there a dead man his killer might still be close by.’’

  ‘‘Indians?’’ McBride asked.

  ‘‘Only the Apache are still hostile and I doubt they’d come this far north.’’ Prescott fought his nervous horse, then said, ‘‘Keep your rifle ready, but if the work is close, toss it aside and shuck your revolver. Fast.’’

  ‘‘Could it be Apaches?’’ McBride asked, the words coming dry as sticks from his parched mouth.

  ‘‘Could be. Sometimes they torture a man so long, his body starts to rot.’’

  McBride wiped suddenly sweaty palms on his pants, then levered his rifle. The mustang’s head was still up, but it was standing pat.

  ‘‘Probably just an animal,’’ McBride said hopefully.

  ‘‘Probably. But don’t count on it.’’ Prescott smiled. ‘‘You ever fit Injuns before, John?’’

  ‘‘Never.’’

  ‘‘Well, I reckon there’s a first time for everything.’’

  McBride sighed. ‘‘And this could be the time.’’

  ‘‘Seems like.’’

  Prescott kneed his mount forward and McBride followed. He knew his seat on the mustang was a precarious thing, and he resolved to dismount and fight on foot if he found himself surrounded by hordes of feathered savages. Back in New York he’d once read a dime novel about Apache who massacred a regiment of U.S. Cavalry. Nothing he recalled about the book provided him with the slightest reassurance.

  The two riders splashed across the stream to the far bank, then followed its meandering course, keeping close to the sun-dappled cover of the cottonwoods. The afternoon was very still, without a breeze. Crickets made their small sound in the grass and once a marsh rabbit bounded away from them, bouncing across the meadow like a rubber ball.

  The stench of death grew stronger.

  McBride saw Prescott ease his Colt in the holster, his eyes roaming far, searching for whatever lay ahead. The black reared, attempting to turn away from the nearness of a thing it feared. A skilled horseman, Prescott fought the stud and pushed it forward.

  McBride followed. The heat of the day crowded uncomfortably close to him, like the naked body of an unwanted lover, and sweat trickled from under his hat brim. He was surprised that he wasn’t afraid, a city boy about to take on the dreaded Apache, sitting a horse he couldn’t ride, holding a rifle he couldn’t shoot.

  The thought, unsettling though it was, made McBride smile . . . until he heard Prescott’s wild curse.

  Chapter 17

  Luke Prescott swung out of the saddle and started to run, yelling at McBride to come after him.

  McBride swung his leg over the mustang, got his foot caught up in the seat-cushion saddle and fell flat on his back. The black cantered past him as he climbed to his feet and pounded after Prescott.

  Ahead of him the stream bank formed a sharp arc around a sandbar, a tall cottonwood standing at its center. Close by, a willow trailed its branches into the water, but McBride’s eyes were fixed on the ruined cabin that lay beyond the trees—and the body that hung in the doorway.

  Prescott was standing a ways off from the crumbling soddy, the gray bandanna he wore around his neck pulled up over his nose and mouth. When McBride stepped next to him the stench hit him like a fist. Swarms of fat black flies buzzed busily around him, the usual slaughterhouse welcoming committee telling their tale.

  ‘‘She’s been dead for at least two days, maybe longer,’’ Prescott said, his voice muffled by the bandanna. ‘‘Little gal died hard.’’

  A sod brick had eroded above the heavy pine frame of the doorway, leaving just enough space for a rope. The height of the entrance was only about six feet, but the young Chinese girl who hung there had been small and her down-turned toes dangled inches above the ground.

  The rope around the girl’s neck had cut deep and it was hard to make out the details of her bloated features. But McBride was detective enough to determine that her neck wasn’t broken— she’d been strangled to death. She was dressed in the traditional knee-length tunic and loose, black pants of the Chinese woman.

  Coyotes had tried to pull her down. That was obvious from her ragged pants and the blood on her legs and lower body. They had taken what they could.

  The watch in McBride’s pocket was ticking, the world around them turning, but for he and Prescott time stood still as they tried to come to terms with what they were seeing.

  A girl, a child really, had been brutally hanged. Why?

  McBride laid his rifle on the grass at his feet. ‘‘Stay here, Luke,’’ he told Prescott.

  The man nodded. He said, ‘‘Sure thing. I ain’t much inclined to get closer.’’

  Last night’s rain had washed away any prints that might have been left by the girl’s killers, but above the doorway a section of the timber and sod roof was still in place.

  McBride walked around to the back of the cabin and stepped inside. Half the roof had caved in and he was forced to pick his way through fallen beams and chunks of dry sod toward the door. A pack rat had made a nest in one corner and a scatter of black pellets on the dirt floor revealed where an owl had roosted.

  He was behind the dead girl now, close to her body, and the smell of rotting flesh was almost unbearable. McBride put a hand over his mouth and nose and studied the soft, dry dirt behind the doorway. There was a single set of prints, the wide, low-heeled outlines of a miner’s boots. The square toes were facing the girl’s back.

  McBride lurched away from the body and put it together when he reached the cleaner air outside.

  The girl had been small and light, too light to strangle easily in the noose. A man, probably a miner, had stood behind the girl and pulled down on her body, hastening her death. It had not been an act of mercy. He, and presumably others with him, had wanted to make certain she died.

  And Prescott had been right. The little Chinese girl had died hard, slowly and with much pain and fear.

  But the question remained: Why?

  ‘‘We can’t leave her hanging there,’’ Prescott said when McBride rejoined him. ‘‘It isn’t decent.’’

  ‘‘No, it’s not,’’ McBride said.

  ‘‘Maybe we can bury her.’’

  ‘‘But not near deep enough.’’

  ‘‘Then what, John?’’

  ‘‘There are dry timbers in the cabin. We’ll burn her body.’’ He turned and looked at Prescott. ‘‘Go into the cabin and g
et the fire started.’’

  ‘‘Me?’’

  ‘‘Yes, you. Out here a man should know how to make a fire. He just never can tell when he’ll need one.’’

  Prescott’s eyes revealed that he’d caught the irony, but he let it pass. ‘‘The smoke will be seen for miles and the men who did this could still be close.’’

  ‘‘So? We’re just a couple of travelers riding through pass-on-by country who happened to stop to give a dead girl a decent funeral. They won’t fault us for that, at least not much.’’

  Prescott thought that through, then nodded and slipped the bandanna from his face. ‘‘I sure hope you know what you’re doing, John. And after it’s over, what then?’’

  ‘‘Like you say, the men who murdered the girl could be close. We will go find them.’’

  ‘‘And then?’’

  McBride’s eyes were wintry. ‘‘We’ll kill them all, Luke. Everybody lives, but not everybody deserves to.’’

  The little gunfighter grinned. ‘‘John McBride, I have the feeling you’d make a mighty bad enemy.’’

  ‘‘Believe it,’’ McBride said. He did not smile.

  Together they cut down the girl’s body, an unpleasant task that had to be done, and laid her out as gently as they could on a pile of timbers. Despite the recent rain the wood was tinder-dry. Prescott used the pack rat’s nest for kindling and the old roof beams readily caught fire. When the timbers were blazing fiercely, sending up a thick column of gray smoke, they stepped back and watched the cabin burn.

  ‘‘We should say some words,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘What god would that little Celestial gal pray to?’’

  ‘‘The same god we pray to, I imagine. He might have a different name in China, that’s all.’’

  ‘‘Well, I don’t know any of the words anyhow,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘The times I watched men get buried, a preacher always read from the Book. Them was a heap of words and not something a man can easily recollect.’’

  ‘‘If we knew the words, we’d say them, Luke. I’d guess right about now the little Chinese girl knows that.’’

  After the fire had died away to ashes, Prescott rounded up his horse and McBride reluctantly climbed onto the bony back of the mustang. As the sun dropped lower in the sky and their shadows grew long, they rode out of the meadow and again followed the wagon trail.

  The trail wound upward through stands of ponderosa and aspen, curving around huge out-croppings of granite rock that grew more numerous as they climbed higher and the air thinned. After an hour the sun was a dull crimson ball low above the western horizon, adrift in a sky the color of ancient jade. A stiff breeze had picked up, whispering wild stories to the aspen that set their leaves to trembling.

  They came up on the water tower of the Union Pacific just as the day was shading into night and the trail petered out to nothing. The tower stood on a siding and close to it was a piled-high pyramid of sawn logs for the furnaces of the locomotives. A small shed with a padlocked door stood a ways from the track, a wooden wheelbarrow leaning against one of its walls.

  ‘‘There’s nobody home,’’ Prescott said, drawing rein on his horse, his eyes restlessly searching the shadowed, aspen-covered hills that rose on either side of the rails.

  ‘‘If Trask’s men take the Chinese girls and opium off the trains here, there could be another wagon trail that we’re not seeing,’’ McBride said.

  ‘‘Unless they load them up and head for High Hopes right away,’’ Prescott said.

  ‘‘We didn’t meet anybody on the trail,’’ McBride said. He groaned softly and shifted uncomfortably on the mustang. ‘‘That means whoever murdered the Chinese girl is still around.’’

  ‘‘Or she may have been dead longer than we reckoned. If that’s the case, her killers could have taken the wagon trail before us.’’

  McBride nodded. ‘‘There’s still enough light for us to scout around and see if there’s another trail headed away from the siding.’’

  Prescott found the trail a few minutes later, a narrow wagon road cut through the aspen that had been just out of sight behind the log pile. He called McBride over and pointed at the hill rising above him.

  ‘‘The trail cuts across the saddleback. It’s got to end up somewhere. I’m betting at a cabin or maybe a cave.’’

  ‘‘We’ll leave the horses here and go take a look,’’ McBride said. ‘‘I don’t want to be slip-sliding on the back of the mustang when the shooting starts.’’

  Prescott glanced at McBride’s gun in the shoulder holster. ‘‘You as good with that self-cocker as I heard?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know what you heard, but I’d say I’m fair to middling.’’

  ‘‘If there’s more than two of Trask’s men, you might want to try real hard to do better.’’

  McBride smiled. ‘‘I’ll try, Luke. Yes, I’ll try real hard.’’

  He watched Prescott swing out of the saddle, briefly envied the man’s casual elegance, then clambered off the back of the mustang. He had not eaten since breakfast, and there hadn’t been much of that, and his stomach rumbled loudly as he and Prescott took to the wagon trail and climbed toward the gap of the hollow hill.

  They drew the night around them like a cloak and became one with the darkness. Very near, an owl asked its question to the heedless wind, then demanded an answer again. Prescott, a horseman unused to walking, made his awkward way along the sunbaked clay of a wagon-wheel track. His spurs were chiming, bootheels thudding on dry pine needles. McBride was glad they were not facing Apache. The dime novel he’d read said the savages heard every sound, even the faintest whisper, and would suddenly come charging out of the dark whooping and hollering, waving their murderous tomahawks.

  He remembered a line from the book that had struck him: ‘‘Many a lovely lass in the first blush of maidenhood they’ve undone, many a stalwart frontiersman they’ve murdered, many a poor old mother’s heart they’ve broken.’’

  McBride nodded to himself. That was a haunting line, penned by a good writer. Someday he’d like to read—

  ‘‘The gap is just ahead,’’ Prescott said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘‘Keep your rifle up and ready.’’

  They reached the crest of the gap and stopped, staring into the night. The moon was rising, but its light was dim, lying thin on the land. McBride could make out the slope of the hill falling away steeply from where he stood, and something else—the lights of a cabin hanging like lanterns in the darkness.

  ‘‘Just as I thought,’’ Prescott whispered. ‘‘They hold the girls here for a spell before taking them to High Hopes.’’

  ‘‘How can you be sure it’s Trask’s men?’’ McBride asked. ‘‘It could be railroaders.’’

  ‘‘I’m not sure. That’s why we’ll get closer and take a look around.’’

  ‘‘Then you’d better take off your spurs, Luke. You make more racket than church bells on Sunday morning.’’

  Prescott grinned, his teeth flashing white in the gloom. ‘‘We ain’t going to no prayer meeting, that’s for sure.’’ He bent, unbuckled his spurs and set them atop a tree stump by the trail. ‘‘Ready?’’

  ‘‘I’m ready.’’