The Murdock's Law

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Deputy,” I corrected. “Yardlinger didn’t waste any time spreading the word around, did he?”

  “It was not he who told us,” interjected Périgueux. “He mentioned it to one of his deputies, who got word to me at the Breen House, where I am staying on business. I decided to send a messenger for Monsieur Mather.”

  “All that for little me,” I said.

  “Yes.” If the Frenchman had picked up on the sarcasm, he didn’t respond to it. “Ever since Marshal Arno’s death two days ago we have been discussing what steps we can take to alleviate the current situation, and it would appear that your arrival is most timely. To be succinct—”

  “Too late.”

  Again he ignored my bad manners. “We wish to engage your services.”

  “We need a town marshal,” Mather said.

  “What’s wrong with Yardlinger?”

  “Monsieur Yardlinger,” said the Frenchman, “is a boy. His experience—”

  “There are no boys west of the Mississippi.”

  Périgueux looked patient. “Yes, we are familiar with your frontier slogans. The fact remains that his experience has not prepared him for the duties of a man in his position. This is not true in your case. Your reputation, Monsieur Murdock, precedes you.”

  I used a word I’d learned long ago in the cavalry. Even Périgueux was taken aback. “I do not understand.”

  “I don’t know how to say it in French,” I replied. “So far I haven’t heard anything to change my mind about placing both of you under arrest. Why don’t you start by telling me what’s coming up that you’d rather I didn’t know about until I’m pinned to that pretty gold badge.”

  “You see?” Mather told the Frenchman. “We should have come right out with it at the beginning, like I said.”

  The Marquis sighed. Why did I have the feeling I was watching a carefully rehearsed play?

  “It is not really much of a revelation, since you have been inquiring around about it before this,” he said. “You know that a certain man, a certain gunman, is expected here shortly.”

  “Shedwell.”

  “Yes. But you do not know why, and neither do we. For some weeks past, there have been difficulties here. Perhaps you have heard something of them in Helena.”

  “Range war,” I acknowledged.

  “Yes, but only a little one.” He emphasized how little with his thumb and forefinger. “The small ranchers, they are jealous of the big ranchers and the grass and water we control. Until now the situation has been of small consequence—a fight with the fists between cowboys from different spreads, an occasional bullet through a window, aimed high so that no one is hurt. The presence of a hired killer, however, changes everything.”

  “Who’s hiring him?”

  He spread his delicate hands, hunching his shoulders at the same time in a Latin show of befuddlement. “Your guess is equal to mine, monsieur. Certainly not we. We have our suspicions, of course.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  Mather said, “We can’t have this kind of thing happening. If the small ranchers start hiring iron we’ll have to retaliate, and then we’ve got a full-scale war on our hands. The next thing you know, the army will step in like they did in Lincoln County, and then everybody loses.”

  “What do you want me to do? I’m planning to arrest Shedwell anyway.”

  “That is precisely what we do not want,” spoke up Périgueux. “These small fry, as I believe they are sometimes called, crave a lesson in competition. As a servant of the federal government, your duty is simply to take him into custody. As city marshal and keeper of the local peace, you would be expected to deliver a somewhat more stringent message to those who would endanger it.”

  I invested the better part of a minute picking apart his speech and turning the pieces over in my head before I grinned and said, “Mr. Marquis—”

  “Please. Périgueux.”

  “That’s got to be the politest way anyone ever tried to hire someone else to kill a man.”

  The mood in the room changed, grew lighter. The pair exchanged triumphant looks. Said the Frenchman: “Then may we assume that we have reached accord?”

  “You may assume that if you aren’t out of this room in two minutes I’ll pump you both so full of lead you’ll reach the lobby without using the stairs.”

  There was a very long pause. It might have gone even longer had not someone knocked at the door. I looked questioningly at Périgueux, who shook his head stiffly. His face had turned the color of old blood. I called out to the visitor to identify himself.

  “Messenger, sir,” came the muffled reply from the hallway. “Telegram for Deputy Murdock.”

  Some more time went by. I was still looking at the Marquis. “If he has anything in his hand besides a telegram, you’ll get the answer quicker than anything Western Union ever delivered.”

  I drew the Colt and sidled up to the door, opening it at arm’s length with my back to the wall. A boy in worn overalls leaned in to stare at me around the jamb. He was holding an envelope and nothing else. I holstered the gun to accept it and gave him too much money to make up for feeling like a jackass.

  “I had to make sure no accidents were arranged in case I turned you down,” I told the ranchers, after the boy had gone. I tore open the envelope. The wire was brief, the way the Judge liked them.

  HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED DEATH MARSHAL ARNO STOP YOU WILL PERFORM DUTIES HIS OFFICE UNTIL PERMANENT REPLACEMENT SELECTED

  HARLAN BLACKTHORNE

  I met Périgueux’s gaze above the margin. He read the gist of the message in my expression.

  “We took the liberty of wiring your superior before coming here,” he explained. “We had no idea at the time that you would react so strongly to our little proposition. You will disregard the directive, of course.” He got up and retrieved a malacca stick from the corner next to the window. “Monsieur Mather?”

  “Just a minute,” I said. “Where do I go to get sworn in?”

  Mather’s narrow face grew blotchy again. Périgueux studied me closely, his disproportionately large head tilted back to peer up at me.

  “Your jest goes unappreciated.” He forgot to say “monsieur.”

  “The gentle folk call me a maverick,” I explained. “It’s a polite way of saying I don’t know who my father is. Rules are not something I pay a great deal of attention to. But I’m not thickheaded enough to ignore a direct order, especially not when it’s in writing.” I rattled the paper.

  Mather called me a name I’d heard before. The Frenchman fingered the head of his stick.

  “We shall of course take steps to have the order rescinded.”

  “Dandy. When it is, you’ll find me down at the jailhouse.” I opened the door for him.

  His expression was hard to read. “May I remind you that you are no longer in the territorial capital and that out here the people have learned to make do with their own version of the law.”

  “Long live the republic,” I said. Neither of my guests seemed impressed on their way out.

  CHAPTER 3

  After they left, I gazed longingly at the bed for a few seconds, then retrieved my hat and followed them out. I had three hours of daylight left and too much to do to spend them between sheets, even if they were the first sheets I’d seen in days.

  Yardlinger was poking a fresh chunk of maple into the stove when I entered the marshal’s office. A heavy-shouldered farm boy in overalls and a burlapbrown suit coat was reading a yellowback novel in a chair behind the railing. He marked his place with a dirty forefinger and studied me through suspicious blue eyes. His hair was corn-yellow, and a sparse sprouting of the same color glittered along his upper lip. He wore a plain star pinned to one overall strap.

  “No Shedwell yet,” announced the other, swinging shut the stove lid with a squeal of rusted hinges.

  “I’m replacing you as marshal.”

  Some kinds of news are best sprung right away, with no waltzing. This wasn’t one of the
m, but I was tired and didn’t have a lot of time. Some of the murkiness had gone out of his gaze as he turned it on me.

  “Who says?”

  “Western Union.” I extended the telegram. He hesitated before accepting it, as if that meant surrender. It struck me, as he read, that his paperwork had doubled since I had come to town. He went through it again, more slowly the second time, then refolded it and put it in his inside breast pocket.

  “I’ll have to confirm this.”

  “I thought you would,” I said.

  “You want him out of here, Oren?”

  We both looked at the towheaded deputy, who had risen from his seat and slipped a hamlike hand into the right side pocket of his threadbare coat. He was two inches taller than I and a dozen pounds heavier, which didn’t concern me. The lump in his coat pocket did.

  “All right, you’ve stood by your boss,” I said. “Now put the gun down on the railing and let the grown-ups finish their business.”

  “You talk tall for a dead man.” He was quivering all over.

  “So do you.”

  His brow knitted, and then he looked at my right hand. I had the Colt pressed to my hip and pointing at his navel.

  “How the hell—”

  “Experience. Empty that pocket or I’ll paint you all over the wall.”

  “Do what he says, Earl,” Yardlinger counseled.

  The gun was a Smith & Wesson pocket model .38, good enough for indoor shooting, which was the kind lawmen usually had to deal with. When it was on the railing and he had moved beyond reach of it, Earl looked even younger, nineteen at the outside.

  “Go home and get some sleep,” the erstwhile marshal told him. “You’ll be needed tonight when those rannies from the Six Bar Six start showing up.”

  “You ain’t going to just let him take over!”

  “Go home, Earl!” Yardlinger’s voice was higher and thinner than usual. The deputy reddened around the ears and banged through the gate, trailing muttered barnyard expletives into the street.

  I holstered the Colt. It hadn’t been fired except for practice since I’d bought it to replace the lost Deane-Adams, but all this leathering and unleathering was going to wear it out. “Did you tell him about me?” I asked Yardlinger.

  “Why?” He produced a long cheroot from the pocket containing the telegram I’d given him and struck a match on the stove, just to give himself something to do. He had quick, nervous fingers, lean like the rest of him and callused.

  “One of your deputies told Périgueux I was in town.” I told him about our meeting.

  The former marshal finished lighting the cheroot and held up the match, watching the flame burn down to within an eighth of an inch of his thumb and forefinger before he blew it out. It seemed to calm him.

  “They were all here when I brought up the subject,” he said. “I told them to keep an eye on you. That was when I was still employed.” He started to undo the splendid badge.

  “Hold onto it. You’ll just have to put it back on when Périgueux gets through wiring my boss about what a menace I am to the community.”

  “I never keep anything no one wants me to have.” The scrap of metal clattered onto the desk.

  “Pin on a regular star then. I need deputies.”

  He hesitated. “I didn’t think you liked me. Besides, you don’t wear one.”

  “They put holes in your shirt, most of them from bullets. And I haven’t met anyone I liked since I came to this town.”

  I watched him lean across the desk and open a drawer from which he plucked an unmarked sixpointer like the one Earl wore. He wiped it off on his sleeve and put it on.

  “I wouldn’t be doing this except that I don’t ever want to smell another cow close up,” he explained.

  I’d handled cattle too before turning to the law. I was beginning to like him in spite of myself. Brusquely I said, “This thing about deputies carrying tales bothers me. Did any of them leave the office within a half hour after you told them I was in town?”

  “I couldn’t say. I left right after to grab a bite. I put Randy Cross in charge. He’s my—your other full-time deputy. You just met Earl Trotter. That leaves Major Brody, the old-timer who fills in as jailer when the rest of us are busy. He just stopped by to kill some time. Any one of them could have done it.”

  “Who would you suspect?”

  “None.” He smoked and brooded. “At least we know it wasn’t Earl. You saw how much he thinks of your taking my place.”

  “I saw what he wanted me to see. That puts him at the top of my list.”

  “Well, you’ll meet them all soon enough. That’s your worry now. I don’t suppose you want to tell me why it’s so important for Périgueux and Mather to have a spy in this office, or why they’re so het up to have you here.”

  “Were,” I corrected. “I told you, they’re worried about Chris Shedwell. They didn’t hire him, so they figure the other ranchers did. They looked at my background and thought I’d be a good one to fire the last shot Shedwell ever hears. Sort of a noisy object lesson.”

  Yardlinger’s cheeks paled slightly, a dangerous sign. “So here you are,” he said. “A hired killer who carries a badge.”

  “I didn’t say I took them up on the offer. You’ve got the reason I’m here in your pocket. They like me even less than you do right now.”

  He continued to stare at me. After a long time he nodded jerkily. “I’ll believe that. Right up until you kill Shedwell or he kills you. Either way you die.”

  “I think your fire’s gone out.”

  I indicated the stove. The cheery glow had faded from the space where the hinged lid didn’t quite fit the opening. Clamping the half-smoked cheroot between his teeth, he yanked open the lid, worked the damper, and blew and stirred the embers until a flame appeared.

  “What’s the problem with the men from the Six Bar Six?” I asked.

  “Hm?” He was watching the blaze creep along the edge of the split maple. It burned blue in the center.

  “You told Earl you’d need him when those rannies from the Six Bar Six showed up. That’s Dick Mather’s spread, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, closing the lid. “He’s got a lot of hotheads slapping his brand this year. A bunch from Bob Terwilliger’s ranch east of here is staying in town and there might be trouble.” He snorted. “There will be trouble. Mather’s been accusing Terwilliger of cutting out Six Bar Six strays for months.”

  “Has he been rustling them?”

  “Hell, you know these cowboys. Of course he has. But no one ever paid much attention to it. Until now.”

  “Is it just Terwilliger?”

  “Probably not. He’s kind of the unofficial head of the small ranchers around the territory, and none of them has enough respect for the big runners to fill a busted bushel basket, especially not for the Marquis. Folks around here generally tolerate foreigners until they start swallowing land like it’s sugar-coated.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you admire him much yourself.”

  His smoke didn’t taste so good any more. He made a face and opened the stove to dispose of the stub. “Let’s just say I don’t have much use for rich people safe in Europe getting hold of the water rights over here and using them to control a hundred times more pasture than they own.”

  “I’ve seen it before,” I said. “The rustling’s an excuse for Périgueux and Mather to run the small fry out and claim their spreads. I take it there’s been trouble already.”

  “Night riders. Grown men with pillowcases over their heads who gallop in and kidnap ranchers out of their beds and dump them out on the prairie to walk back ten miles naked. Last week they caught one of Terwilliger’s hired hands on his way back to the bunkhouse and made out like they were going to lynch him to a dead oak.”

  He had been watching the fire. Now he twisted shut the damper and replaced the lid with more clang than was necessary.

  “How’d you like to be set on your horse in the dark with your hands trussed beh
ind you and a rope around your neck so tight you can’t swallow, one slap away from a slow strangle? Yeah, they had a high old time that night. So high that when they finally untied him and let him go he just kept on riding until Terwilliger’s son caught up with him to ask why he was stealing one of his father’s horses, and the hand blurted out the story. He was so scared he’d soiled himself.”

  “You favor Terwilliger.”

  “I favor a man’s right to do his job without having to hunch up every time he hears hoofbeats. Terwilliger’s contributed his share to that feeling. He’s offering a bonus to the first hand that brings back an ear belonging to a Six Bar Six man. Along about midnight, when every cowboy in town’s had his fill of liquor, someone’s going to try and collect that bounty. And that’s why I told Earl he’d be needed.”

  “I hope you told the others the same thing. Those loaded?” I nodded at the rifles and shotguns in the rack behind the desk, chained together like convicts on a work detail.

  “Every last one of them. Think we’ll need them tonight?”

  “Maybe not for shooting, but five men in badges standing around with long guns don’t do much for a cowhand’s fighting spirit. I’ll need a key.”

  “Take mine.” He pulled a ring out of his hip pocket.

  “Keep it. They have a habit of getting lost just when you need them most. Did Arno have a separate key?”

  “Up at the Breen House. He lived there the past year or so to get away from his wife. Room seven.”

  I’d seen the Breen on my way in. Four stories, with a restaurant on the ground floor and colored glass out front. I whistled. “What do you folks pay your marshals?”

  “Forty a month and ten cents for every stray dog he shoots in the city limits.”

  “He must have shot a lot of dogs to afford a room in that hotel. Or that fancy box they planted him in.”

  When he scowled, the tips of his black moustache almost touched beneath his lower lip. “It helps to claim a cut of the profits of every game in town.”

  “I figured as much. His stuff still in the room?”