The Murdock's Law

by Loren D. Estleman

  “They told me you was in town shipping cattle with the Harper outfit. You had kind of a reputation then. There was some wanted me to give you a try. I said I reckon not.”

  “They were saying the same thing on my side. I keep reading about famous triggers shooting it out, but I’ve never heard of it really happening.”

  “That’s because you don’t make a reputation dying young.”

  He was having fun and we both knew it. Face to face with Chris Shedwell I didn’t stand a chance. I said, “Well, that was a long time ago, and now the boot’s in the other stirrup.”

  “I heard you was looking for me. What you doing here anyway? Talk is you’re wearing tin for R. B. Hayes.”

  “I am. The job here is just a hobby to keep me busy during my vacation.”

  His face looked grim for the first time since we’d been talking. “It’s that mail train thing, ain’t it?”

  “They say you killed the clerk in the express car near Wichita just to get back at the city council for dismissing you as marshal,” I said.

  “That’s stupid. If I wanted to do something like that, it’d be one of the ones fired me I’d kill. Besides, I wasn’t dismissed. I had a contract with the council and it run out. Am I the reason you’re in town?”

  “One of them.”

  “The main one, I’ll warrant. Well, I hope you didn’t waste too much public money getting here. Was I a taxpayer I’d write my congressman and complain, if I had a congressman.” He set aside my gun and dug a travel-worn fold of paper out of his breast pocket.

  I got up carefully and reached to pluck the scrap from his outstretched hand. If civilization was measured by the amount of paper that changed possession in the space of a few days, civilization had come to Breen.

  It was a document signed by the sheriff of Sedgwick County, Kansas, and bearing the seal of a notary public, to the effect that Christopher Sarsfield Shedwell had been cleared of all charges connected with the robbery of the mail car on the Union Pacific Railroad and the shooting death of postal clerk Aloysius Garvey on September 4, 1877. It was dated last May 22. I read it twice, refolded it, and put it in a pocket.

  “I’ll have to confirm it with the Sedgwick County sheriff.”

  “Figured you would. I’d like that back after. I’ve had to show it to every lawman betwixt here and Fargo.”

  “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  He studied me with eyes the color of lake water when you break through the ice on a clear winter morning.

  “Couple of years back I killed a Pinkerton in a fair fight in a town I don’t recollect the name of in Idaho and took to the mountains. That was dead December, and the wind was like razors. I lived in a shallow cave for eleven days, eating sardines cold with my fingers and potting at Pinkertons’ heads whenever they showed themselves until they gave up and went back to town. I was found innocent at the inquest, but I still have to cross the street every time I spot a Pinkerton or shoot it out.”

  “Is there a point to that story?” I asked, when he didn’t go on.

  “Only that after a man’s got through something like that, he don’t place a lot of trust in a piece of paper to pry him out of a tight spot.”

  “If this is confirmed, I’ll wire Judge Blackthorne. In a month every jailhouse west of the Alleghenies will have a copy.”

  “That’s if I let you leave here,” he said.

  I paused. “What’s the percentage in killing me?”

  “Them writers back East could do a lot with me outshooting Page Murdock.”

  “Not much. I’m not well known, thank God. I’ve got better things to do with my time than spend half of it practicing my fast draw and the other half taking on all comers. And I try to avoid mountains in the wintertime.”

  “I got all the reputation I need anyway.” He extended the Deane-Adams, butt first. I was reaching for it when he spun it and I found myself looking down the bore.

  “Wes Hardin pulled that one on Hickok in Abilene a few years back,” I said. “You’re stealing material.”

  “Who do you think taught it to me?” He handed me the revolver and then the shotgun. “We’ll meet again, most likely, but that time the rules will be different.”

  I put the gun away. “Don’t give me rules. You’re not talking to one of those eastern writers. Who paid your way to Breen?”

  Creases in his face made him not much younger than I, but when he smiled they vanished, the years falling from him like dead bark from a log. “Sure, rules,” he said. “I’m supposed to keep why I’m here a secret and you’re supposed to find out.” He opened the door and held it for me.

  He followed me down to the second-floor landing, where he hung back. I felt his eyes on me all the way across the lobby and out the front door.

  CHAPTER 18

  “What is this, the honor system?” Yardlinger sneered. He and Randy Cross were standing on the boardwalk on either side of the hotel entrance, holding their shotguns. “You go on to the jail and wait for Shedwell to turn himself in?”

  “I’ll explain later. Get the Major.” I turned and stepped back inside, leaving them there.

  The clerk raised his eyebrows at my return. “Step around in front,” I commanded. “Come on, come on. I promise not to shoot you.”

  Reluctantly he obeyed, cringing slightly as if he’d left his pants behind. Keeping one eye on the staircase landing, now deserted, I stood next to him and measured. I had maybe half an inch on him. Close enough.

  “Take off your coat.”

  He stared, opened his mouth to speak, then drew it shut. Awkwardly he peeled off his black swallowtail. His shoulders came off with it. I shrugged out of my own canvas jacket and told him to put it on. He hesitated, then complied, draping his coat over the desk. He looked like a scarecrow in his new attire, but from a distance he could pass. I took off my hat and put it on his head. It went right past his ears and settled on the bridge of his long nose. I lifted it from him, glanced around, then, ignoring his protests, tore two blank pages from the open register and stuffed them into the sweatband. That made it a perfect fit.

  “You’ll find three men waiting out front,” I said. “You know them, they’re my deputies. Go with them to the marshal’s office and wait there for me. Tell them I told you to do that.”

  “The desk,” he explained. “Someone has to watch it.”

  I had him by the shoulders and was pushing him toward the door. “It’ll still be here when you get back. Didn’t you ever play lawman when you were a boy? Here’s your chance to relive your childhood.”

  “My mother wouldn’t let me play. I had to stay inside and practice the vio—” The door slammed on the rest of it.

  Striding back across the lobby, I shoved the clerk’s coat down behind the desk out of sight and took up my original station inside the staircase curve. I considered the logistics, then lay the shotgun across the chintz-covered settee. In close quarters a long gun can be worse than no weapon at all. Then I waited.

  I had time enough to hope that the deputies would take the clerk at his word and accompany him to the office rather than enter the lobby to confirm what he told them, and then there were footsteps on the stairs and Chris Shedwell’s dusty brown boots appeared coming down. I stepped back farther into the curve.

  The Deane-Adams was slippery in my grasp. I changed hands and wiped my palm on my shirt. Then I switched back, willing myself to relax once again until the revolver snuggled easily into my grip. I had done all this hundreds of times before and didn’t have to think about it any more than a woodchopper has to concentrate before spitting on his hands and taking hold of the axe.

  He hit the carpeted floor at an easy lope, swiveling his head left and right out of old habit to take in the entire lobby. My nook protected me from observation. He was wearing his hat and a Confederate officer’s gray coat with captain’s epaulets and powder burns around a patch on the left elbow. He’d ridden guerrilla during the war and I wondered if he’d been wound
ed in the fighting or if he had told the truth about getting shot in Lincoln County. Or if the coat had come from a dead man.

  A third of the way across the room he stopped. The unoccupied desk had alerted him. He grasped his Remington and started to turn. The sound of the Deane-Adams’ hammer was like dried acorns crunching in the empty lobby. He froze.

  “What you said before about wainscoting?” I reminded him.

  He held that position for a beat, and then he slowly raised both hands and started to fold them across his chest. I told him to keep raising them. I didn’t know but that he was wearing a third weapon in a shoulder sling.

  “Turn around.”

  He did so, looking amused as far up as his freckled and peeling cheeks. You wouldn’t have known it from his eyes.

  “The clerk,” he said. “I should have figured that wasn’t you crossing the street. I used that trick ducking vigilantes in Denver.”

  “Who do you think taught it to me?”

  “Dime novels.” He grinned. “Them writers’ll kill us all yet.”

  “And write about it afterwards. Who hired you, Périgueux, Mather, or Terwilliger? Or was it someone else?”

  “Don’t know the gentlemen. I’m here on a social visit.”

  “Colleen Bower?”

  His eyes widened slightly, then returned to normal. “They said you was fast. I thought they meant guns.”

  “Breen’s the north side of hell. You didn’t ride all this way just to see a woman.”

  “She’s got a fine Irish name.” He leaned on the brogue. “Maybe I’m homesick.”

  “Annie isn’t an Irish name, and we don’t know that that’s hers either.”

  “You don’t know mine’s Shedwell.”

  “I think it is. No one would call himself Sarsfield if he had a choice. You’re running out of answers.”

  “But you won’t shoot,” he said. “On account of I ain’t here to sell my gun and that paper in your pocket says I ain’t wanted. So what say we get us some supper? I been sleeping almost since I got in. I ain’t ate at table going on three weeks.”

  “No one knows I have that paper but you and me. As far as anyone out here is concerned, you’re fair game.”

  He mulled that over. Then he shook his head. “If you was thinking that way, you’d of put one through me before this.”

  “I never could bluff,” I sighed, letting down the hammer. “Eat your supper and clear out. Just remember that the next time a cowboy dies within a day’s ride of town you won’t survive him by long.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  He wasn’t smiling as he said it, and I was still thinking about it after he had gone through the door that led into the hotel restaurant.

  I went back to the office to put away the shotgun and trade coats with the clerk, who on his way out muttered something about the wisdom of staying in Chicago. Cross and the Major had gone home. Yardlinger watched me from behind the desk. He was still wearing his hat, something he rarely did indoors.

  “I guess I’ll have to wait for your autobiography to find out what all that was about,” he said.

  I dropped into one of the other chairs, suddenly weary. “It won’t take up much space. See what you think of that.” I flipped the folded document Shedwell had given me onto the desk. He read it swiftly, then looked up.

  “Think it’s genuine?”

  “What am I, a forgery expert? Wire Sedgwick County. If he’s like any other lawman the sheriff will be eating supper about now. Tell them to send the reply here and get something to eat meanwhile.”

  He got up and stretched, bones cracking. “Want something sent over?”

  “I lost my appetite at the hotel.” I tilted my hat forward.

  I must have dozed, because when I opened my eyes again it was dark out. I turned up the lamp just as Colleen Bower walked in. She was wearing something that caught the light and threw it back, and clutching her wrap at the neck. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, or maybe it was rouge.

  “Someone steal your handbag?” I asked. “It can’t be worth much with that hole you blew in it.”

  She stopped halfway between the door and the desk. “You’re drunk.”

  “I’d like to be, but I’m just tired.” Then I read her expression. “What is it?”

  “Dick Mather’s hands are going to hit Terwilliger’s Circle T tomorrow morning.”

  I started to rise, then sat back down. Playing it close to the vest. “How do you know?”

  “Some men from the Six Bar Six are at Martha’s. I overheard them discussing it in the parlor. They’re drunk and loud.”

  “Sure?”

  She tilted her chin. “That they’re drunk or that I overheard them?”

  “That they’re making plans. Never mind.” I remembered that I was still wearing my hat and took it off, placing it on the desk. Mother would have approved. “Why come to me?”

  “I thought you might be interested.” Her tone dripped ice.

  “I mean, why should you care? You’ll excuse me if I look this particular gift horse in the mouth, but what good is even a free mount with bad teeth?”

  “Don’t you trust me by now?”

  “If you’re talking about last night, that doesn’t have much to do with anything.”

  “Miss Jessup was right. She told us that men lose their respect for women who say yes.” She started to turn away, then stopped. “Maybe I wanted to make your job a little easier. Maybe I think there’s been enough murder done in this vicinity.”

  I waited, but she didn’t say anything more. “What time tomorrow morning?”

  “First light.”

  “Thanks. Anything else?”

  Her lips parted, then pressed together, etching unbecoming lines from mouth to nostrils. She drew the wrap tighter about her shoulders, spun, and flounced out, her heels knocking the boardwalk until the noise was lost in the waning traffic outside.

  Minutes later a boy entered with my answer from Wichita. I paused in the midst of checking the loads in the long guns to tip him and open the envelope. A cowhand convicted of the strangling death of his common-law wife north of Hays had confessed to the lone robbery of the mail train the night before his hanging, lifting suspicion from Chris Shedwell.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Is that your answer, Marshal?”

  I’d forgotten the messenger was still there. I shook my head and sent him off. Yardlinger returned as I was locking up the guns. I showed him the wire and briefed him on what Colleen had told me. Sitting in the customer’s chair, he played with a pen and listened in silence until I finished.

  “You believe her?” he asked then.

  “I was going to ask you the same question. You’ve known her longer than I have.”

  “But not as well.”

  I grinned. “For some reason, given my obvious appeal, I’ve never been able to convince myself that I’m the Lord’s gift to womankind. When one of them starts confiding secrets I always feel for my poke.”

  He tested the pen’s nib on the ball of his thumb. “There’s another explanation. Remember what I said about the second rule of successful gambling.”

  “If she wants to stay on the right side of the law, she wouldn’t dangle false bait,” I agreed.

  “And she did save your hide last night.”

  “Hers too, don’t forget. You never know where a bullet’s going to land in a small room. Besides, leading us into an ambush would improve her standing with the cattlemen on both sides. They’d be calling the shots once we’re dead.”

  “Sounds like you’ve talked youself into disbelieving her story.” He stopped playing with the pen.

  I shook my head. “I’ve talked myself around in a full circle. One thing’s sure, though. We can’t ignore it.”

  He pushed himself out of his chair, flipping the pen so that it stuck in the stained blotter for a moment before flopping over. “I’ll get Randy and the Major.”

  “No hurry. Just say what’s
on the fire and tell them to meet us here at three o’clock. We’ll need all the sleep we can buy between now and then.” I stood and put on my hat. “I’ve got some doors to try before I turn in.”

  “Think you should?”

  “If I don’t, Mather’s men will suspect something. Besides, ducking lead is one of my many talents.”

  With darkness, the action in town had moved indoors, leaving the streets deserted but for the occasional transient making his unsteady way between saloons. A shoe-heel moon shed milkwater light over the east side of the street. I confined the early patrol to the facing side, where the shadows lay. That’s one thing you gave up when you accepted a star, the right to walk in the light. City marshals were targets at the best of times, but in a wide-open town they were always in season. I’d kept to the shadows so long that I was beginning to grow leather wings and sleep upside down.

  Piano music spilled out of the saloons as I walked past, snatches of tunes mingling with the general racket of loud talk and drunken laughter, now riding a wave of warm air tainted with stale smoke and old beer, now fading to a whimper as I left the barrooms behind to rattle the doorknobs of darkened shops and peer through shuttered windows. I took my time crossing alleys, where a tongue of blue flame licking from the darkness could send me rolling for my life in the dust or kneeling in my own blood, depending on whether I detected anything before the trigger was squeezed. But they were quiet.

  I was on my way back across the street when Yardlinger emerged from the Pick Handle with Major Brody in tow. We met just off the boardwalk.

  “Randy’s inside,” reported the chief deputy. “Dead drunk.”

  I cursed. “He picked a fine time for it.”

  “He’s still busted up over Earl. We can’t talk to him.”

  “Think we should start pouring coffee and salt into him, Cap’n?” Brody asked.

  “That depends on whether he’s a mean drunk.”

  He grinned toothlessly. “There’s other kinds?”

  “Then let him go till he fags out. We’ll have enough people trying to kill us in the morning without starting early.” I gave Yardlinger what was left of the roll I’d brought from Helena. “Hand that to the bartender and tell him if Randy isn’t in a bed—any bed—by midnight I’ll close him down permanently.”