Ralph Compton: West of the Law

by Ralph Compton

  ‘‘Can you ride a horse, Inspector?’’ McBride asked.

  ‘‘No, but I can commandeer one of the wagons at the station.’’

  ‘‘Too slow. Donovan has a head start—you’d never catch him.’’ McBride smiled. ‘‘You can follow on behind me.’’

  ‘‘In what direction?’’

  ‘‘That, I don’t know. At least, not yet.’’ McBride stepped toward the door, then stopped. ‘‘Inspector, you’ll find a dead man in the box of the lead wagon. He’s wearing my hat and probably has my Smith & Wesson, money belt and watch. Get them for me, will you?’’

  ‘‘All right, that’s the wagon I’ll commandeer,’’ Byrnes said. He watched McBride walk unsteadily to the door. He said, ‘‘John, be careful. We’ll be right behind you.’’

  McBride nodded his thanks, stepped out of the saloon into the daylight and headed for Marshal Clark’s barn.

  There was a grim determination in McBride. He intended to bring Shannon Roark and Sean Donovan to justice.

  The question was—where were they?

  Chapter 32

  John McBride was halfway to the barn when he saw a plump woman in a gingham dress striding purposefully along the boardwalk toward him. She stopped when she was a few feet away.

  ‘‘Would you be John McBride?’’ she asked. Then she answered her own question. ‘‘Judging by the description he gave me, you must be.’’ She smiled. ‘‘Lordy, you look all beat-up, but you’re not near as ugly as he said.’’

  ‘‘What can I do for you, ma’am?’’ McBride asked. He was irritated. This was no time for chitchat.

  ‘‘My name is Lavender Coffin and I do for the marshal now that his . . . er . . . lady is gone.’’

  By this time Dolly was probably riding the cushions of the orphan train. McBride felt a small sadness at her departure, which he could not fully explain.

  ‘‘How is the marshal?’’ he asked.

  Lavender shook her head. ‘‘Not well. He sent me to look for you, if you were still alive, like. He needs to talk to you.’’

  McBride nodded. ‘‘I’ll see him.’’

  ‘‘Come back to the house with me,’’ the woman said. ‘‘I’ll wash that blood off your face and head.’’ She gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘‘You poor thing.’’

  Lavender had opened the curtains of Clark’s room, letting in a stream of angled sunlight where dust motes danced. The room smelled of furniture polish, baking apple pie and the slow rot of the man in the bed.

  ‘‘Mrs. Coffin said you wanted to see me, Marshal,’’ McBride said. He shrugged an apology. ‘‘I don’t have much time.’’

  ‘‘I know. I saw Shannon Roark riding out of town with a man. I figured after all the shooting I heard earlier that you’d be going after them. That is, if you were still standing.’’

  ‘‘In what direction were they headed?’’ McBride asked, his interest quickening.

  ‘‘Northeast.’’ Clark studied McBride’s face. ‘‘She was smiling at the man. Didn’t look much like a captive to me.’’

  ‘‘She’s not.’’ McBride let the flat statement lie there.

  The marshal understood and did not push it. ‘‘If I was a gambling man, I’d bet the farm that they’ll stay west of the Picketwire, away from the rough, high-ridge country. They’re probably heading for Las Animas on the old Santa Fe Trail, where they can catch a train east.’’

  ‘‘Then I’ve got to be on my way, Marshal Clark. Thanks.’’

  The man in the bed nodded. ‘‘Take care, McBride.’’

  McBride stepped to the door, then stopped. He turned and said, ‘‘I killed Hack Burns. I thought you’d like to know that.’’

  Clark’s grin was wide. ‘‘Thank you, McBride. Now I can die easy.’’

  McBride walked to the barn and saddled the mustang, trying to fend off most of Lavender’s attentions. But the woman, a bowl of soapy water and a washing cloth in her hands, was determined. She cooed over him, dabbed blood from his face and head, then applied a generous amount of stinging stuff with a cotton swab.

  ‘‘I know that must smart, poor dear,’’ she murmured. ‘‘But we don’t want a nasty infection, do we?’’

  It was with considerable relief that McBride swung into the saddle, told Lavender to let Inspector Byrnes know where he was headed, then took the trail to the northeast. After an hour he crossed Timpas Creek. The stream was dry, its rocky bottom bright with yellow, purple and red wildflowers.

  Flat, rolling country lay in front of him, rising abruptly in the east to a rocky ridge that sloped away to the Picketwire. The sun had dropped in the sky, but the day was still hot and the land drowsed in a deep silence, the only sound the steady thud of the mustang’s flinty hooves and the creak of saddle leather.

  McBride was not a tracker, but he was enough of a detective to follow the trail of the two horses ahead of him. Confident that he would not be followed, and unused to riding, Donovan was setting an easy pace. McBride rode up on a small green meadow where underground water nourished a stand of cottonwoods. Someone, no doubt Shannon, had stopped there and picked wildflowers. McBride counted a dozen broken stems of buttercup, blue iris and corn lily and there were probably more he could not see.

  A buttercup, wilted, had strayed from Shannon’s hand and lay on the grass like a drop of gold fallen from the sun. McBride picked up the bloom and studied it for long moments. Finally he touched the flower to his lips, then carefully tucked it away in a pocket.

  Grief and a dark sense of loss took hold of McBride and he let out a long, shuddering sigh that had its genesis deep inside him where the worst of hurts dwelled.

  A flock of crows descended on the branches of the cottonwoods, wheeling like pieces of charred paper from out of the blue sky. They called out to one another noisily, for now ignoring the man who stood head bowed in pain, a gang of ragged ruffians who stood ready to mock him should he not quickly move along.

  McBride stepped into the saddle and resumed his ride to the northeast. Behind him, the sun began its journey to the western horizon and the shadow of man and horse stretched longer across the prairie grass.

  Three hours later, as the evening became night and the first stars appeared, McBride saw the light of a campfire ahead of him. He eased the Colt in his waistband and rode toward the camp . . . as around him the coyotes began to sing their requiem for the departed day.

  McBride dismounted when he was still two hundred yards from the camp. He covered the rest of the distance on foot, trusting to the darkness to keep him hidden. When he was close, he saw Shannon and Donovan standing in each other’s arms near the guttering fire. Shifting, scarlet shadows streaked the night around them and the wood crackled and snapped, sending up small showers of sparks.

  Donovan kissed Shannon hard and long, then pushed her away from him, holding her at arm’s length. He grinned and said, ‘‘I’ll have a lot more of that later, but right now it’s time for you to put some supper together.’’

  ‘‘Don’t bother.’’ McBride spoke from the gloom, his voice hollow as a death knell. ‘‘You won’t have time to eat it.’’

  Sean Donovan was an affable, talkative man, but in that instant he realized the time for talk was not then. He turned, drawing from under his coat, his wild, angry eyes flashing ruby red in the firelight.

  McBride drew from the waistband and his gun flared. Hit hard, Donovan staggered and tried to bring his Smith & Wesson Russian to bear. McBride fired again and the man fell heavily, his arm landing across the fire, throwing up a crimson fountain of sparks.

  Shannon cowered among the shadows, her horrified eyes on McBride. He stepped to the fire and kicked Donovan’s smoldering coat sleeve from the flames.

  Donovan’s eyes rose to McBride’s. ‘‘Damn you,’’ the man snarled. ‘‘Damn you to hell, McBride.’’

  McBride nodded. ‘‘Keep a seat warm for me, Sean.’’

  Donovan’s mouth opened to speak, but his lips pulled back from his gritted teeth
in a death agony. He rattled deep in his chest, trying to kill McBride with his glare, and then his life left him.

  Swinging his gun on Shannon, McBride said, ‘‘Let me have the bulldog, Shannon. I don’t want to kill you.’’

  The woman had an arm behind her back and McBride watched her closely. ‘‘Don’t even try it, Shannon,’’ he said. ‘‘I have others close behind me. Even if you kill me, they’ll track you all the way to Las Animas and beyond if they have to.’’

  ‘‘What will they do to me?’’ the woman asked. All of a sudden, she looked scared, unsure of herself.

  McBride shook his head. ‘‘I don’t know. Inspector Byrnes will take you to the law and then it will be up for a jury to decide.’’

  ‘‘A jury!’’ Shannon almost spit the words. ‘‘They could put me away for years.’’

  ‘‘Yes. A long, long time.’’

  ‘‘I can’t let that happen.’’ Shannon stepped closer to McBride. She was smiling. ‘‘John, you can forget what happened between us. That . . . that was all a mistake on my part. We can leave—we can leave right now and be together just like you planned. I was wrong, I know it now. Please, John, give me another chance. I can make you happy, I know I can.’’ Her smile was warm, wonderful. ‘‘I will make you a good wife, John.’’

  McBride’s smile was without humor. ‘‘A wife who did her best to kill me back there at the saloon?’’

  ‘‘I didn’t try to kill you. I aimed wide on purpose.’’

  ‘‘I’d say that’s real good shooting,’’ McBride said drily. He saw a small defeat in Shannon’s eyes as she opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off. ‘‘You made a sap of me once, Shannon. I won’t let it happen again.’’ He motioned with the barrel of his Colt. ‘‘Now, let drop whatever you’re holding behind your back.’’

  ‘‘There are no second chances with you, McBride,’’ the woman said. ‘‘Are there?’’

  ‘‘Not tonight, Shannon. Or any other night.’’

  ‘‘I thought so. Well, I can’t allow you to let me rot in a prison for forty years.’’

  The .44 bulldog came out quickly from behind Shannon’s back. McBride hesitated, reluctant to shoot.

  That was all the time she needed. Shannon shoved the muzzle of her gun between her breasts and pulled the trigger. She gasped and fell backward and McBride crossed the ground fast, taking a knee at her side.

  ‘‘I’d die a little death every day in prison,’’ she whispered, blood red against the paler pink of her lips. ‘‘I won’t let that happen.’’ She raised a hand and her fingers lightly touched McBride’s cheek and she smiled. ‘‘You poor sap,’’ she said.

  She died, leaving a void in McBride’s heart that he knew he would never fill, not if he lived for a hundred years.

  He was still kneeling beside Shannon’s body the next morning when Inspector Byrnes and another detective lifted him gently to his feet and led him away.

  ‘‘Are you sure you won’t come back to New York with us, John?’’ Inspector Byrnes asked.

  They were standing on the platform of the High Hopes train station, surrounded by a hundred females that Byrnes had taken under his wing, vowing to find good homes for all of them back along the line.

  McBride shook his head. ‘‘No, Inspector, for me that life is over and there’s no going back. The West has changed me. For better or worse, I haven’t discovered yet.’’

  ‘‘But surely you don’t intend to stay in High Hopes?’’

  ‘‘With Trask and Donovan gone and the Golden Garter closed, High Hopes is finished as a town.’’ He shrugged. ‘‘Maybe they can save it by attracting the cattle trade. I don’t know.’’

  ‘‘But what will you do, John?’’ The inspector’s eyes moved to the end of the platform where the mustang was tied, a blanket roll behind the saddle. ‘‘Just ride here and there on that ugly horse?’’

  ‘‘That’s about the size of it, Inspector.’’ McBride smiled. ‘‘But first I have to find a home for four young Chinese girls I left behind me. That might take time.’’

  ‘‘Huh, you think that’s hard? Try finding homes for a hundred caterwauling females.’’

  ‘‘Good luck, Inspector, and give my thanks again to the men who came here to help.’’ McBride took off the money belt Byrnes had returned to him and handed it to the man. ‘‘There’s around six hundred dollars there. Make sure Mrs. Stanton gets it.’’

  ‘‘But, John, that’s every penny you have.’’

  ‘‘I’ll make out,’’ McBride said.

  Later, after the train left with Byrnes and his girls, McBride swung into the saddle and headed west.

  The sun had begun its climb into the sky, heralding the dawn of a bright new day.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  Detective Inspector Thomas Byrnes created the first New York Detective Bureau on May 25, 1882. Byrnes hired forty detective sergeants at an annual salary of one thousand dollars and ordered them to use their powers of deduction rather than brute force to solve crimes. Something of a Sherlock Holmes himself, Byrnes later became a major dime novel hero who handily outsold his closest rival, Theodore Roosevelt.

  In the late 1860s and throughout the next fifteen or twenty years, ‘‘orphan trains’’ were dispatched west from Chicago, New York, Boston, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Funded by charities and religious organizations, the trains were packed with hundreds of children under the age of fifteen, removed from overcrowded city orphanages. In most cases this worked out well for all concerned, but many kids fell into the hands of pedophiles, pederasts and other perverts. Many were beaten to death by cruel adoptive parents or by people who posed as parents but were truly little more than task-masters.

  Some readers, especially those familiar with film noir, might be surprised at the use of the word ‘‘sap’’—as in fool or simpleton—in an 1880s context. The word was widely used in its present meaning as early as 1815, and probably grew out of the earlier word ‘‘sapskull,’’ a thick or stupid person.

  The railroad yard in the opening chapter of West of the Law is now the site of Grand Central Station.

  Heroin was first synthesized from morphine (a derivative of opium) in England in 1874. By the mid-1870s it was being imported in fairly large quantities from Britain and Germany to the United States, where the drug was touted as a ‘‘safe, non-addictive substitute for morphine.’’ It was then that the heroin addict was born.

  The hypodermic needle was invented in 1853 by Scottish doctor Alexander Wood. By the late years of the War Between the States the needles were in widespread use to administer morphine to wounded soldiers. Morphine had been used as early as the War of 1812, but was given orally. One result of battlefield morphine was that many soldiers went home with an addiction, taking their needles with them.

  The author is convinced that heroin was being mainlined in the West in 1882, but had not yet replaced the easier to get laudanum. When he researched what heroin was called back then, he hit a brick wall. It could be that the soiled doves and other addicts of Deadwood and Tombstone called the drug ‘‘heroic’’ or ‘‘heroic medicine.’’ But it’s more likely that it was already called heroin and that’s the name that was later trademarked by the Bayer Company in the 1890s. Overall, the author feels comfortable portraying his Chinese doves shooting up heroin with hypodermics in 1882, and that they and their handlers call the drug by that name.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  the next exciting Ralph Compton novel,

  Blood Duel

  by David Robbins

  Coming from Signet in December 2007