Ralph Compton: West of the Law

by Ralph Compton

  The woman’s shadowed face revealed no offense. ‘‘That’s where you’re wrong, McBride. I love Lute, I love him dearly—that’s why I won’t stick around and watch him die one day at a time. I owe him that much, I owe myself that much. Years from now, when I’m old, I’ll remember him, but I’ll remember how he was. I’ll remember the good times we had together when we were young and the sun shone brighter.’’

  Unbidden, McBride felt a surge of compassion for Dolly that she noticed and laid aside. ‘‘Don’t feel sorry for me, McBride,’’ she said. ‘‘Feel sorry for yourself.’’

  She turned to go but stopped, as though she’d suddenly remembered something. ‘‘The first time you came to Lute’s house, you asked him if he knew about orphan trains. Are you still interested?’’

  ‘‘You were listening?’’

  ‘‘No, Lute told me. You intrigued him, McBride, and he wanted to talk. It was one of his better days.’’

  ‘‘I was interested then, hardly at all now. But I guess I’d still like to hear what they are.’’

  Dolly leaned and rested her arm on a stall partition. ‘‘The trains seldom get as far west as Colorado, but a few have pulled into Denver in past years. They leave from Chicago, New York, Boston, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati and they’re packed with children removed from city orphanages. Most of the kids are under fifteen, and they’re chosen for their health and good looks.

  ‘‘Handbills, flyers and newspaper articles alert people along the rail route when the trains will be stopping. When an orphan train pulls into a town, the children are displayed for, as it’s called, adoption.’’

  McBride was interested despite himself. ‘‘It’s a good way for orphans to find a home.’’

  ‘‘For some it is. But others are beaten and worked to death and God knows how many fall into the hands of perverts who abuse them horribly. There’s no oversight to the orphan trains, no follow-up, and if a child is beaten or worked until he drops, nobody cares. In some places there are so many orphaned teenaged girls, they’re worth only twenty cents more than a Missouri mule.

  ‘‘Of course, saloon owners and pimps like Gamble Trask are eager participants in the adoption process. They know that many girls, and boys, prefer being forced into the worst kind of sexual slavery than starving to death or dying of disease in an orphanage.’’

  Dolly’s teeth gleamed. ‘‘You’re from the big city, McBride. Ever visit an orphanage?’’

  McBride said he had not, an admission that gave him a twinge of conscience.

  ‘‘They’re prisons, cold, dark prisons, overcrowded, disease-ridden, hellholes of starvation and abuse.’’

  ‘‘How do you know so much about orphan trains?’’ McBride asked. He anticipated what the woman’s answer would be and she did not prove him wrong.

  ‘‘I was a child of an orphan train. I was sixteen then and quite pretty. A man just like Gamble Trask bought me and forced me to service any cowboy who got drunk and felt the need for a woman. I was working the line when Lute found me. He killed the man that owned me and then a lawman who tried to stop us leaving town. I owe him for that, but I figure my debt is paid.’’

  McBride told himself that none of this was his concern, but the policeman’s curiosity remained strong in him. ‘‘Why did Theo Leggett hang on to life long enough to mention orphan trains? Is one stopping here?’’

  ‘‘Yes, day after tomorrow. It’s a special train out of New York, put together by a man named Sean Donovan for Gamble Trask. All of it done with the blessing of the city’s charitable organizations, I should add.’’

  ‘‘Special, how?’’

  ‘‘All beautiful, blue-eyed, blond girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen. An even hundred of them. The train will make no other stops. It will arrive in High Hopes directly from New York.’’

  ‘‘How do you know all this?’’

  ‘‘Silas Knowles, the ticket agent, told me. He is aware of everything that happens on the Santa Fe railroad, has a lot of friends down the line.’’

  ‘‘I remember him as a free-talking man,’’ McBride said.

  ‘‘He is at that. But he told me because at a later date I promised to give him something he wants. But he may not need it anymore. Silas has two hundred dollars saved and he plans on asking Donovan and Trask if he can use it to adopt the prettiest twelve-year-old he can find on the train. He says even a man his age has his needs.’’

  McBride was thinking. The orphan train could explain why Donovan was in town. He was looking out for his merchandise. But what was Gamble Trask going to do with a hundred young girls? Then he remembered Portugee. The man was a slave trader. He could buy the girls from Trask and later sell them at a profit . . . but where? San Francisco? Or somewhere else?

  A hundred girls was a lot of females to ship, but Portugee had a silver, persuasive tongue. He could tell them he was taking them to a wonderful new life in California, load them on a train and scuttle back across the Divide. If any of the girls guessed what was going on and balked, he had a dozen men to ensure that they stayed in line during the trip.

  There could be another, perhaps even more pressing reason why Donovan was in High Hopes. Someone at police headquarters in New York had opened the letter McBride had sent to Inspector Byrnes and had told him the man who killed his son was holed up in High Hopes. Donovan was ever a man who liked to mix business with pleasure and he’d be eagerly anticipating putting a bullet into John McBride. Or a death much worse and a whole lot slower.

  Dolly’s light laugh lilted from out of the darkness. ‘‘McBride, no matter what you think, you’re still a peace officer. I can see your brain working.’’

  McBride shook his head, clearing his thoughts with the clean sweep of self-interest. ‘‘Dolly, the orphans are not my problem. I’m getting out of town with Shannon.’’

  ‘‘You’ll turn tail and run and leave a hundred young girls to their fate?’’

  ‘‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’’

  ‘‘Then you’re very much less of a man than I thought you were. No wonder you feel the need to hide your face behind a false beard.’’

  McBride was exasperated and it honed a hard edge on his voice. ‘‘Look at me, Dolly. What do you see? I’m one man. There’s only me. What the hell do you expect me to do?’’

  ‘‘Be the sworn law officer you claim to be. Don’t allow those girls to be bought and sold like cattle. Five years from now not one of them will still be alive.’’

  ‘‘That’s no business of mine.’’

  ‘‘At one time you thought all the terrible things that were happening in High Hopes were your business.’’

  ‘‘That was then, this is now. To reach where I am this very moment I’ve had to step over the bodies of dead men. Well, I’ve had my fill of death and killing. I want out of it, and so does Shannon.’’

  Dolly’s head nodded in the darkness. The mustang chomped on his bit and in the distance the mournful coyote chorus was in full voice.

  ‘‘Then God help you, John McBride,’’ Dolly said. ‘‘From this night until the end of your life you will never again be able to hold up your head in the company of men.’’

  The woman’s words hit McBride like blows. He watched in silence as Dolly turned her back on him and walked out of the barn. A sick, empty feeling in his gut, he knew that a piece of him had gone with her . . . and it would never return.

  McBride gathered up the reins of the mustang. He would take the long way around to the livery, holding to the darkness. Where he belonged.

  Two shots, close together, hammered apart the glassy fabric of the night.

  ‘‘Oh God, Shannon!’’ McBride whispered, his face wild with fright.

  Then he was running . . . running toward the sound.

  Chapter 27

  A crowd of men was gathered at the entrance to the alley beside the Golden Garter—Sean Donovan, the Allison brothers and Gypsy Jim O’Hara among them.

  H
e slowed to a walk when he got closer, and tapped a miner on the shoulder. ‘‘What happened?’’ McBride waited for an answer, fearing what it might be.

  ‘‘Gamble Trask,’’ the man said. ‘‘Shot twice in the back.’’ The miner grinned. ‘‘I wouldn’t get any closer, old-timer. The killer is still around and maybe he’ll decide to take a potshot at you.’’

  McBride had forgotten that he was wearing the false beard and wig. Now, as relief flooded through him, he was grateful for both.

  Hack Burns, wearing his marshal’s star, strolled out of the saloon and roughly pushed men from his path. He had a hurried conference with Donovan, then disappeared from view as he bent to examine the body.

  Confident of his disguise, McBride elbowed his way though the excited, chattering crowd. He drew a few annoyed looks, but no one moved to stop him.

  Gamble Trask lay on his back, his eyes wide open, staring at nothing. A look of horror and surprise was frozen on his face, as though he’d been unable to understand the manner and reason for his dying. McBride’s practiced eye pieced it together. Hit twice in the back, Trask had tried to turn to face his assailant, drawing from a shoulder holster. His gun was in his hand, but he’d never gotten the chance to use it. He’d collapsed, dead when he hit the ground.

  Someone had lured Trask to the alley and then murdered him. Sean Donovan killed like that. He had set up the orphan-train deal and it could be he figured the profits were too thin to be shared. The killing of Trask had Donovan’s slimy paw prints all over it.

  But the man’s death had removed his claim to Shannon. A major obstacle had been removed and now McBride’s path out of High Hopes with his future wife was clear. In a few minutes they would be on their way to a new life in a new place well away from the sullen drift of gun smoke.

  It had cost just two cents, the price of a couple of cartridges, to end Gamble Trask’s dream of political power forever. The big deal he’d talked about, the sale into sexual slavery of one hundred young girls, had cost him his life and all his ambitions.

  McBride considered that dying in a stinking, muddy alley had been a fitting finish for a man who had deserved no better.

  ‘‘And what kind of finish do you deserve, Detective Sergeant McBride?’’

  It was Dolly’s voice in his head, haunting him, taunting him, giving him no peace.

  McBride made a tremendous effort of will and pushed the thought away from him. What did Dolly know about anything? He was the best judge of what was best for him, for the woman he loved, not her.

  He looked over at Donovan, who was talking with Hack Burns. Then his eyes fell on O’Hara. The man was watching him intently, a fixed, puzzled expression on his dark face, as though he was trying hard to remember something.

  Quickly, McBride looked away. He turned and hurriedly retraced his steps along the boardwalk. It was time to pick up his horse and go meet Shannon.

  Marshal Clark’s house was in darkness as McBride stepped into the barn and led the mustang outside. The moon was much lower in the sky and a streak of pale blue light showed above the horizon to the east, where the dawn was preparing to boost the sun above the low hills. The plains were still shrouded in darkness and a few sentinel stars remained awake as McBride swung into the saddle and rode out into the gloom.

  He shed his beard and wig, then made a wide arc around town and came up on the livery from the west. A tin rooster stirred in a gusty breeze at the peak of the roof above the door, screeching as it swung this way and that, frantically trying to point out the direction of the capricious wind. Darkness clung close to the stable and the open door was a mysterious rectangle of black.

  Where was Shannon?

  McBride stepped out of the saddle and walked toward the door. He stopped when he was a few steps away and whispered, ‘‘Shannon?’’

  There was no sound but the constant shriek . . . shriek . . . shriek of the tin rooster on the roof and the sighing of the wind. A dust devil spun like a dervish a few yards from McBride and collapsed at his feet, sifting mustard-colored sand over the toes of his shoes.

  ‘‘Shannon?’’ he called again, louder this time.

  A man emerged from the door of the stable, small, dapper, grinning. ‘‘She’s not here, McBride. But I am.’’

  McBride was stunned. ‘‘O’Hara! How did you—’’

  ‘‘Know you were coming here? Let’s just say a little bird told me, a pretty little female bird at that.’’

  Dolly! He’d said he was meeting Shannon here. This was how she’d gotten back at him for leaving High Hopes—by betraying him to Gypsy Jim.

  ‘‘You made a big mistake, McBride,’’ O’Hara said. The little assassin was poised, ready, a deadly scorpion about to strike. ‘‘A man can wear a disguise, but he can’t change the color of his eyes. That got me to wondering when I saw you in the saloon, and later when you came to pay your last respects to poor Mr. Trask. See, an old man has faded, milky eyes, but yours are bright blue. Young eyes in a graybeard’s face? It just didn’t ring true. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced I was looking at Detective Sergeant McBride as ever was.’’ O’Hara shook his head. ‘‘A smart shadow like you should have known that.’’

  ‘‘Donovan send you here?’’ McBride asked.

  ‘‘No, I came on my own.’’ O’Hara threw a burlap sack at McBride’s feet. ‘‘But I’ll give him your head in that after I kill you.’’ The little man was reaching down to the right pocket of his coat. ‘‘I never liked you, McBride, the stiff-necked copper who couldn’t be bribed. It’s going to be a real pleasure to put a bullet into you.’’

  ‘‘Where’s Shannon?’’

  Was she in the barn, bound and gagged and unable to cry out?

  ‘‘Like I said, she’s not here, McBride. It’s only me . . . and you.’’

  O’Hara had made his intention to kill him clear. The time for talking was over.

  If McBride had learned anything in the West, it was not to underestimate the sudden effectiveness of the gunfighter’s fast draw.

  ‘‘Listen, O’Hara, let’s talk—’’

  He drew, very fast from the waistband. O’Hara, smirking, overconfident of his gun skills, was taken completely by surprise. He was still groping for the gun in his coat pocket when McBride’s first bullet hit him.

  The man spun halfway to his left. But now he had a gun in his hand. He was bringing it up for an aimed shot when McBride fired again. The bullet hit O’Hara’s collar stud and drove it through the back of his neck, smashing the spine. The man let out a scream and dropped to his knees. He looked at McBride for a few moments, his eyes unbelieving, then fell flat on his face.

  The rooster on the roof screeched its frustration with the wind as McBride stepped to O’Hara and turned him over with his foot. The man was dead.

  Without conscious thought, McBride punched the two empty shells from his Colt and reloaded from the rounds in his pocket. He stuck the gun back in his waistband. It was likely that others would come to investigate the shooting at this hour of the morning, but he took time to search the barn. Shannon was not there.

  McBride swung into the saddle and rode into the plain, where the light was shading from black to cobalt blue. A time to think, then he’d look for Shannon.

  He was sure she was in the hands of Sean Donovan, and he knew how badly the man treated women.

  He had to free her—even if it cost him his own life.

  Chapter 28

  John McBride rode due north into the brightening morning.