The Murdock's Law

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Murdock,” he called, his voice rising and falling on the prairie wind, “you are a one for lying down in the middle of the afternoon.”

  “You son of a bitch,” I muttered in relief. But I held onto the revolver. Raising my voice: “Yardlinger, you are a one for asking to get your moustache shot off.”

  “Not unless that gun Thorson sold you fires Sharps Big Fifty cartridges.”

  I got up, holding it at hip level. Sometimes it pays to look like you walked out of something by Ned Buntline. “Step down and start leading your horse this way. From the left side, opposite the scabbard. I’ll tell you when to stop. And keep your hand away from your belt gun.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You don’t set much store by friends.”

  “I had a friend once,” I said. “He tried to gut me with a skinning knife when I beat his straight with a full house. Move.”

  He did as directed, leading his piebald by the bit and holding his left arm straight out to the side like a carpenter carrying a heavy toolbox in the other hand. The rifle on the saddle was the Winchester carbine I’d carried the night before. When he was fifty feet away I motioned him with the revolver to stop.

  “Now neither of us has to shout.” I relaxed a little, resting the butt of the Deane-Adams on the bone of my hip. “Start with why you shattered that bottle.”

  “Is that all that’s biting you?” He smiled, but it died short of his eyes. “I never could resist a target like that. I’m the champion rifle shot of the county three years running.”

  I watched him, especially his eyes. At length I sighed and replaced the revolver in its holster. “It was a hell of a good shot.” I wanted to say something more, to try and restore the good thing that had been growing between us. Instead I said, “What are you doing out here?”

  “Looking for you.” His tone was colder than it had been when we’d met. “Pardee rolled into town an hour ago on a buckboard. His brother’s in the back. Someone lynched him, and this time they finished the job.”

  We found the buckboard in front of one of the town’s two undertaking parlors. The box was empty but for a coil of rotted twine and about a pound of wet sawdust, wagon stuff. BYRON C. FITCH, MORTICIAN was lettered in gold paint across the parlor’s curtained front window.

  The interior of the parlor looked more like a cathouse than most cathouses I’d seen. Curtains were drawn across the front window and lamplight sifted dimly over the muted carpet and rows of mourners’ chairs arranged in front of a casket on a raised platform draped in black felt. The sweet smell of hothouse-grown flowers enveloped us as we entered.

  An old man with wispy white hair brushed back over dry pink scalp and a scowl that had defied the undertaker’s best efforts lay in the casket, his head raised on a satin pillow and spotted hands folded across his vest. We took off our hats, as if that mattered any more, and went on past him through a door standing half open into the back room.

  Rosy light from the setting sun fell through two small windows high in the west wall, illuminating a cluttered pine bench, half a dozen lidless caskets, and a naked corpse stretched out on a pair of planks nailed together and propped across a pair of sawhorses. The raw stench of formaldehyde contrasted sharply with the flowery smell in the parlor.

  A pudgy man in shirtsleeves who had been bent over the body glanced up and said, “Thank God! Please help Mr. Pardee out of here, Marshal. He’s not doing anyone any good, especially himself.” I recognized him as the man I had seen riding shotgun on Marshal Arno’s hearse the day before.

  Pardee, in rusty range clothes and a Stetson grown colorless from sweat and weather, looked like a man on the wrong end of a long fever. His face was slack and heavy, his eyes hot and sunk deep in purple-black sockets. I almost didn’t recognize him without a cigar.

  “Look at him.” His voice was so low he might have been praying. “Look at what those bastards did to him.” He was gazing at the thing on the planks.

  The dead man was whipsaw-lean, tanned from neck to hairline and from fingers to wrists, and gray-white everywhere else. His eyes bulged, the burst blood vessels in the whites black and twisted like hairs on the lip of a washbasin, and his tongue was a dark swollen thing that had grown too big for his mouth to hold. The rope had burned a blue line around his neck and the weight of his body had stretched it twice its normal length. His clothes had been flung to the floor in a heap.

  “Pardee said he was last seen this morning, when he rode north after some strays,” Yardlinger said. “When he didn’t show up by midafternoon, Pardee and some of the hands went looking for him. They found him dangling from a tree a mile inside the Circle T’s northwest corner.”

  “A mile short of the Six Bar Six.” The foreman’s prayerful moan had fallen to a hoarse whisper. “They didn’t even bother to tie much of a knot. They just let him strangle.”

  “Whose strays was he after?” I asked. “Terwilliger’s or Mather’s?”

  Yardlinger gaped. “Murdock, for God’s sake—”

  But Pardee was already moving. In one spring he was on me, his big muscular hands squeezing my throat. His eyes bulged like his dead brother’s and saliva foamed at the corner of his mouth. I scooped out the Deane-Adams and pronged the barrel deep into the arch of his rib cage. Air whooshed out his lungs, spittle flecking my face. But he held on. My vision turned black around the edges.

  I was about to fire when there was a solid thunk like an axe sinking into soft wood; Pardee’s eyes rolled over white, his hands clutched at my shoulders for support when his grip failed on my throat. I stepped back and he toppled forward, first onto his knees and then onto his hands, where he stayed with his head hanging down.

  Yardlinger was standing over him, holding his Navy Colt like a hammer with the butt foremost. When he was sure the foreman’s part in the drama was finished he executed a neat spin that ended with the gun securely in its holster.

  “Obliged. Not that I needed help.” I put up my own gun the conventional way.

  “He was in the right. That was a hell of a thing to say.”

  “Maybe. If those strays had turned out to be Mather’s, I’d have known where to look for his brother’s killer.”

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  “Mather strikes me as smarter than that, knowing we’d suspect him. Unless some of his hands decided to do the boss a favor on their own time.”

  “That’s Turk all over.”

  The undertaker was agitated. “Quick, Marshal, get Mr. Pardee out of here. He makes me nervous.”

  “I can see why,” said the deputy. “Your customers don’t usually comment on your work.” He’d been watching Pardee, who remained in a daze on his hands and knees. Now Yardlinger looked at the little man. “He had five men with him when I left. Where’d they go?”

  The undertaker shrugged distractedly. “They went out right after helping carry in the body.”

  I said, “Twenty dollars on where they’re going,” and started walking.

  Yardlinger called after me. “It’ll be dark in a few minutes. You’ll break your neck.”

  “That’ll save Judge Blackthorne the trouble when he hears I let a range war blow up in my jurisdiction. I’ll fetch the other deputies. Lock up Pardee and wait for us at the jail.” I scattered empty chairs on my way through the parlor.

  CHAPTER 12

  We clattered down the freezing, shadow-splashed street at full gallop, five men on wild-eyed horses loaded down with iron, a hellish sight for the curious who had come out to see what the commotion was about. Of the two rifles left in the rack I had chosen a Henry for myself and made Cross give up his shotgun for a Spencer. Yardlinger, who held on to the Winchester, informed me that Earl and the Major knew their way around handguns well enough to do without. The old man, who had no horse of his own, had commandeered one from the livery. Our destination was the Six Bar Six.

  Clouds boiled past the moon, merging the solid black of trees lining the road with the smothering wrap of the night itse
lf. The horses were frightened and let us know with whinnies drawn thin as threads of molten silver. Vapor billowed from their nostrils. The air was as cold as the water in a mountain stream.

  Yardlinger rode point as guide. At first I had nothing to go by but the feel of his piebald’s backdrifting breath on my face, but as my eyes caught up with the darkness I was able to make out his lanky form in the saddle. Now all I had to worry about was the occasional chuckhole in the road, which could splinter a horse’s cannon like green wood.

  Time stands still at night. It might have been five minutes and it might have been an hour before we heard a crackling in the distance, as of someone crumpling brittle parchment. There was no telling from which direction the sound of the shots had come. I slowed to a canter and finally to a walk, barking at the others to do the same.

  “What we doglegging for?” Earl wanted to know. “You got a bet on how it’ll come out?”

  I ignored the sneer in his tone. “We won’t get there any faster on dead horses.”

  “He’s right. Shut up,” said Yardlinger.

  We alternated between cantering and walking while the animals’ sides heaved and their spent breath enveloped us in a shroud of moist warmth. Meanwhile, the distant crackling continued in fits and starts, now pausing, now erupting again in flurries so rapid it was impossible to count the individual reports. It sounded unreal, like fake gunfire onstage.

  The horses smelled it first and passed it along to us in exhausted snorts and the dozen other noises they make when approaching a place of rest after a hard ride. It reached us a moment later. I stood in the stirrups and drew in a double lungful of the familiar, faintly pleasant odor redolent of hundreds of nights spent around stoves and campfires. Woodsmoke. I was about to call it to the others’ attention when Yardlinger grunted and I looked ahead to see a red glow fanning out across the western sky.

  I’d seen something like it once before, riding with Rosecrans’ cavalry on the way to hell at Murfreesboro. Coming out of a patch of woods, we had spotted the fires of a Confederate encampment reflected in the low-hanging clouds six miles away. It looked like the sun getting ready to rise, and it only happened when there was a lot of flame …

  We pushed our mounts the rest of the way. Even so, we were a long time getting there, too long. We heard men shouting and horses screaming and more shots raggedly spaced, and then we heard nothing but the splitting and popping of wood being consumed by fire. Too late, said the hoofbeats beneath us. Too late, too late. Then we thundered over a rise and were there.

  The blaze had passed its peak, but coming straight from darkness I had to shield my eyes against the glare. Flames were slurping at the charred framework of what had been a large barn, clinging to the corner beams, and crouching along the rafters like hordes of magpies stuffing their swollen bellies long after the carcass had been reduced to gristle and bone. An occasional horseman flashed past and was swallowed up in darkness. There was galloping around us, two or three shots fired at nothing in particular, and then there was nothing at all, just the noise of the fire sating itself. I spurred the roan in that direction, fighting it all the way.

  “Murdock! Stay back!” Yardlinger’s voice was strident. “The barn’s coming down!”

  The heat on my face was blistering. My mount fought the bit and reared. I threw all my weight onto its neck, and when its forefeet touched ground I swung out of the saddle, landing flat on my heels with a jar that sent sharp pains splintering up my legs. The roan nearly knocked me down with its shoulder as it spun to get clear of the flames and smoke.

  Yellow tongues lapped and stuttered at the doomed wood, flicking illumination this way and that. I was alerted to a chilling sound nearby, half snort and half whistling whimper, and saw a horse kicking and thrashing on its side in the barn’s blazing doorway, a mass of charred, flaming flesh still fighting for life. Its eyes were gone and its lips had burned away to expose grotesquely leering teeth. I put a bullet in its head from the Deane-Adams. It arched its neck and flopped to the ground like a trout landing, emptying its lungs with a sigh and thrusting its legs in four directions.

  The air next to my right ear split with a sharp crack, simultaneous with the deep report. On the edge of the firelight leaned a wagon with a broken wheel; in the right triangle of darkness beneath I spotted a blue phosphorescence on the fade and fired at it, darting for shadow even as I loosed the shot. I waited, but no bullets answered. Instead I heard a voice.

  “Don’t shoot! I’m wounded.”

  It was a young voice, breathless and cracking.

  I said, “Can you stand?”

  I heard grunting and struggling. A pause. “No.”

  Major Brody was standing just beyond the circle of light, which glinted orange off his Peacemaker’s sight. “Cover him,” I snapped.

  “You bet, Cap’n.” He cackled shortly. “Don’t make no moves I might regard as hostile, young feller. I’m mostly owl and a little bit bat. That means I can see in the dark.”

  I circled around and came up on the wagon’s blind side, stifling a curse when I tripped over a bulky object on the ground and almost fell. It was a man’s body. I bent down, groped for his collar, and pressed my fingers against the big artery on the side of his neck. It was just a useless tube now. I crept around the corpse.

  As I drew near the wagon, the flames found an unburned section of rafter and flared up greedily, lighting the space under the broken-down vehicle. The man lay on his left hip, his left arm stretched out along the ground ending in a revolver and his right leg thrust in the opposite direction. His pants leg was slick with blood where he was gripping it with his free right hand. His face was turned toward the Major.

  When the light died, I took two long strides and, going by memory, stuck my left foot under the wagon on top of his gun arm and reached sideways and down to clap the muzzle of my revolver to his temple. He stiffened, then struggled to free the trapped arm, but I leaned into it and he gave up.

  “Please don’t shoot me, mister,” he begged again. “I think my leg’s busted.”

  Brody spoke up. “Who’s your boss? Turk or Pardee?”

  There was no answer. The old man spat. I heard the tobacco splatter the wagon’s sideboards. “You called it, son.”

  “Don’t shoot!” I put as much authority into the command as I could muster. The old night rider was in his element and I wasn’t sure he could be controlled. “Not unless you want to swing right here.”

  It made him pause. Skeptically: “You’d do that? A U.S. marshal?”

  “Deputy,” I corrected. “And you’re damn right.”

  Some more time passed. Finally I heard the slide and click of the Colt’s hammer being replaced. Going into his belt the gun made a creaking sound like tightly gloved fingers curling into a fist.

  I said, “Fix up some kind of torch and bring it here.”

  We were left in darkness for several minutes. The wounded man’s breath moved in and out sibilantly, fluttering from time to time and catching whenever a spasm of pain shot through him. I heard Yardlinger shouting to Earl and Cross to check out each of the other outbuildings, neither of which had been touched by fire. It was like listening to an argument in the next hotel room, of interest to me but none of my business.

  I was beginning to wonder what had happened to the Major when a ball of flame separated from the dying blaze of the barn and bobbed our way, his bowlegged figure hobbling beneath it. At that moment the roof fell in with a noise like a bundle of laundry striking the floor from a great height. Bright orange sparks swarmed upward for a hundred feet and vanished. A corner post tilted, hung motionless for a couple of seconds, and toppled away from the inferno, crunching when it struck ground. Brody didn’t even turn to watch. I guessed he’d seen his share of burning buildings.

  “I soaked a loose stave in a barrel of coal oil I found back of the barn,” he said, squatting to grin at us from the other side of the wagon. His stubbly face was smeared black with soot.

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p; “What do you want,” I retorted, “a Johnny Reb medal? Hold it steady.”

  He cackled again. I never found out if he did that out of habit or for effect. “I still like you.”

  The wounded man was one of the horseback riders we’d confronted with Mather in Breen the night before. I pried his Navy Colt out of his grasp, stuck it in my belt and lifted my boot from his wrist. He rubbed it with his other hand, bloody from nursing his own wound.

  “I’m Murdock.” I leathered the Deane-Adams. “You remember me.”

  He looked at me, blankly at first, and then he nodded. He had brown hair and pimples. “I remember. I thought you was one of them bushwhackers. That’s why—” He sucked air through his teeth and gripped his leg.

  “Let’s have a look at that.”

  I got down on one knee and gently lifted his hand from the pants leg, stiff with gore and glistening in the torchlight. “Got a knife?”

  The Major handed me his, a slasher with a hidewrapped hilt. I used it to slit the material from knee to thigh and pulled it apart. Bits of white bone showed in a wound as big as a doorknob. I covered it hurriedly.

  “It’s broken.” I didn’t tell him how badly. “We’ll get help.”

  “Help’s here.”

  I looked up. A man was standing behind the Major with his back to the flames and a lever-action rifle in both hands, trained on us. Brody dropped the torch and went for the revolver in his belt.

  “I’ll blow your heart out the wrong side.” The deep voice was so calm there was almost no threat to it. Almost. It sounded familiar, but I’d heard too many new voices in the past couple of days to sort them out. The Major let his hand drop from the Peacemaker’s butt.

  “Who is it?” I demanded.

  “Turk.”

  “It’s all right, Abel,” broke in the wounded boy. “They ain’t with the bushwhackers.”

  “Then whose bullet is that in your leg?”

  There was no answer.