Silver Moon

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “The bodies are in the vault. And good morning to you too Doc.”

  He gave me a sharp look at that reply. “Two men dead. Murdered. One a friend. It is not a good morning.”

  Now I did feel the fool. Away from the sight of their blood, I had begun to think of the deaths as a problem to be solved. Doc’s blunt words reminded me that two men had stopped living. Two small pieces of lead had robbed them of any future joys, sorrows, hopes, or dreams. The two men had left behind folks who would not coldly view their murders as the beginning of a tangled chase, but instead would grieve the loss deeply.

  “You heard already?” I finally said. “Word gets around quick.”

  “Sharp for a lawman, aren’t you. Take long to realize that earthshaking revelation about a town as small as Laramie?”

  He started to walk ahead in that slow painful way he had of grating his bones into motion.

  “Doc.”

  He heard my anger. Stopped. Slowly turned to me.

  “I’ll agree it is not a good morning,” I said. “You have my apology for that. And if the bodies had been cleared, you might have cause to call me fool. But lay off spitting nails in my direction. I ain’t the cause of whatever is stuck in your craw.”

  “What if I decide not to lay off?”

  “You’ll only shame yourself, throwing stones at someone who ain’t gonna throw back. I’m particular about who I choose for an enemy.”

  He thought that through. Snorted. Looked, for the first time, directly at me. “Samuel Keaton, that’s the name?”

  I nodded. I’d been marshal here a few weeks, and he would know my name. I took the question as a grudging hello.

  “Maybe you’re more than a gunslinger.” No smile. “You’ll excuse me.”

  He moved to the vault.

  That left me nothing to do but return to Crawford in his office. He was standing beside his desk, wringing his hands as he stared at the wall.

  “Lorne Calhoun began work for the bank in ’70, right when it opened,” Crawford said without being prompted. “Started as a boy who swept the floors. Worked his way up.”

  I sat at the desk, picked up the fountain pen. Splotched again, this time by accident. “Was it unusual for him to be here at night?”

  “No. Not at all. More like unusual for him not to be here. All he did was work. He had the keys, of course.”

  “Combination to the vault?” I asked.

  “Combination to the vault. He probably knew the workings of this bank better than I did.”

  Without the pomp that he kept around himself, Crawford seemed like the sad little boy he must have once been. I wondered — and knew I was mean for doing it — how long it would take for him to puff himself up again.

  “How much money missing?”

  “Twenty-four thousand, three hundred and fifty dollars in bank notes. Twelve thousand, six hundred and twenty in gold.”

  When a cowpoke made thirty dollars a month, that was some kind of money. I didn’t hold that thought long.

  “Sit, Crawford.”

  “What?”

  I sighed. “Sit.”

  He did.

  “Lift your feet.”

  “What?”

  I wanted to slap him.

  “Lift your feet.”

  He did.

  I squatted for a closer look. His left boot heel had tiny splashes of dull black-red on the side.

  “Crawford, you stepped over the bodies to count.”

  He nodded—without the grace to blush.

  That, at least, explained the heel print in the blood beneath Calhoun. I found myself happy to be able to dislike Crawford again.

  “What time was that, Crawford?”

  “I get here at seven-thirty. I walked in, saw the vault door partly open and—”

  “And took a half hour to reach me with the news.”

  He flapped his arms to express helplessness. “There’s the money.”

  As if that said it all. He’d worked with Calhoun almost since Laramie had become a town.

  “Why so much on hand?” I asked. “Seems risky.”

  “Payroll,” Crawford said. “We handle payroll for the Union Pacific rolling mills.”

  Did I imagine extra nervousness? Why was he loosening his tie?

  “What else do you know, Crawford?”

  He swung his head sharply, as if trying to decide whether my voice had been accusing.

  “I know I didn’t murder anyone.”

  Before I could ask anything else, the outside door banged shut.

  No one had entered the bank, so I assumed Doc Harper, not a model of Southern gentility, had left without calling a good-bye.

  “You’ll put a reward out for the return of that money?” I asked Crawford.

  “Fifty dollars for every thousand recovered. Be close to two thousand dollars to whoever turns all of it in.”

  He’d given that thought too, stepping over the body of the man who had served this bank for so long.

  I hid my disgust and asked the most obvious question I had left.

  “Who else besides you and Calhoun could get into the vault outside of banking hours?”

  There it was again. The little twitch. A tug at the tie. Unless I was looking too hard, grasping at anything.

  “No one,” he said. Too loudly?

  “But what if you died when Calhoun was out of town? Or the other way around?”

  “Then the bank would be closed until he or I returned.” A defiant tone? Nor did it make sense he’d want the bank close. Not from a man who had wanted the bank open to customers while his vice president lay dead in the vault?

  I rubbed my eyes. I searched my mind for anything else to ask.

  Crawford wheezed each breath as he waited.

  Trouble was, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

  I swung out of Crawford’s chair and motioned for him to occupy it. When he was seated, I handed him the fountain pen and gave him the remaining blank paper.

  “Write down everything you knew about Calhoun. Everything about Nichols. When you’re finished, and only then, call for the undertaker.”

  “I’ve got a bank to run. A town to oversee and —”

  “I can’t do everything myself which is the only choice I have,” I said, “being as when town council considered hiring me a deputy, you worked so hard to swing the vote against it.”

  I left him there. Maybe something would show up on his list that would point me toward a third person. Or at the very least, toward someone else who might point me in the right direction. More importantly, I wanted Crawford occupied while I went back to the vault.

  I wondered what would possess Doc Harper to make an appearance when he knew the men were beyond his help.

  The bodies had been shifted.

  Lorne Calhoun was now on his back. Doc Harper had placed his brown suit jacket over the man’s head and upper body. I realized, almost with a shock, how tall Calhoun was. Death in my mind had shrunk him, but Doc Harper’s jacket showed me wrong.

  It took more will power than I knew I had to lift the jacket. There was the blood to discourage me from that action. And the disrespect of uncovering a man covered by a friend.

  Calhoun’s eyes were open wide in what looked like surprise, if a person wanted to put emotion on his face. His shirt had been opened to show where the bullet had entered the center of his chest. The bullet hole, wiped of blood, now appeared clean and black against marble skin. What kept my eyes open so wide was that I was trying to see Calhoun, instead of my brother in his dying moments. Even on closer inspection, I could not find anything unusual about the bullet hole, and I straightened.

  Bob Nichols had been moved too. He was on his side, moved a foot away from the blood that had emptied from the front of his throat. The exit hole of the bullet was lost in the matted hair at the back of his skull.

  Death filled my nostrils and the coffee now rising inside me as bile was a good indication that I should leave.


  My search, however, was not complete.

  I swallowed hard, and stepped around each man to take the revolvers. A tentative sniff told me that each gun had been fired recently, and a quick check of each cylinder showed an empty brass shell where the pin had last struck.

  Lastly, I took one of the oil lamps from its stand. I knew too well that flesh and blood offers little resistance to the smashing velocity of a chunk of half-inch lead, so I held the oil lamp close to the back wall and slowly raised and lowered it until I saw a shiny dent, shoulder height.

  I looked at the floor and saw bits and pieces of the slug that had caused the shiny dent.

  I should have felt more at peace to discover the proof that a shot had indeed been fired in here. And even more relieved to find another slug mark slick on the inside of the vault door, chest high, almost centered in a blood smear— proof that Calhoun had been shot from where Nichols had stood.

  I told myself maybe that’s how it did happen. Nichols finds a way into the vault, and is surprised by Calhoun. Or maybe they’re in on it together and having a falling out. Or maybe Nichols forced Calhoun in here at gunpoint late last night and didn’t expect a banker to have a gun hidden nearby in a safe-deposit box.

  However it happened, everything in the vault did add up to to a point-blank shootout.

  Except, of course, for two things. Doc had told me it was murder.

  And, of course, the missing money.

  Chapter 4

  I’d briefly spent time in Laramie when it was little more than Fort John Buford. That was ’68, when Union Pacific laid tracks across the Wyoming Territories in barely more than a year’s time. I’d been earning wages then by shooting buffalo to feed the Union Pacific work crews, and after the push from Cheyenne to get the tracks and construction crew through both the winter and the Laramie Mountains, it was a relief that spring to get down here into the plains between the Laramie and Medicine Bow ranges, especially with the tent town and fort that awaited us to offer some form of civilization.

  We didn’t stay long in the new town of Laramie — at two miles of track each day, we never did in any of the end-of-track towns — but my memories of it had always been favorable.

  I suspect much of that good impression simply had to do with the weather. Misery inflicted by the fierceness of winter had ended, and we had yet to hit the blistering dryness of summer that would make for such arid windswept hell through the basin flats into Rawlins and Rock Springs.

  When we left, the army left with us, moving west with the tracklayers to protect them from Injuns, and Laramie was abandoned to the ruthless and lawless, who managed in our departure to run off what was left of city government. It left the town without law and order for five months, until in October of that year a vigilante committee formed among the citizens. In one bloody night, five outlaws were killed, fifteen wounded, and four others hung from telegraph posts.

  I saw none of that action, of course, as we were near to Green River by then, but news travelled fast up and down the tracks, and I heard soon after. So did many of the gamblers, army deserters, and assorted outlaws, who suddenly decided that prospects for better health lay west of the Laramie Plains, and searched for it according. Things turned so peaceable, I’m told by oldtimers here, that by the summer of ’69, Laramie had one school and four churches.

  *************************

  Now — barely six years since I’d seen it as a town of dirty white tents clustered around a fort — Laramie had secured its future. Other end-of-track towns — Bryon, Benton and Bear River City — were dying, but Laramie had its rolling mills to make rails for the mighty Union Pacific. It also had a three-story territorial prison made of limestone bricks on the west bank of the Big Laramie River and cattle ranches spread up and down the plains of the wide valley between the mountains west and east of town. There was money enough in this town.

  I could walk down main street in the mid-morning sunshine — as I was doing now — and see that prosperity alive in the steady movement of men on horses or driving buggies, and of women in cotton dresses as they picked their way along the wooden sidewalks or between horse apples while crossing the dirt street.

  Aside from Crawford’s bank, The First National with its obvious wealth marked by brick construction, there were three others, false-front wooden exteriors high and wide and freshly painted in vain efforts to match their hallowed competitor.

  At the far end of Main, the Union Pacific rose against the backdrop of the far mountains. Set almost within the shadows of this forty-room hotel were the station depot and telegraph office.

  Between the hotel and where I stood, a quick scan of the board signs that hung from the Main Street buildings showed more of the encroaching comforts of civilization. HILLMAN’S EATERY. THE BROADWAY SUITATORIUM — PRESSING —BOOTS & SHOES CLEANED AND SHINED. KELLERS PHOTO PORTRAITS. MALCOLM’S QUALITY MILL & CABINET WORKS. THE LARAMIE SENTINEL— CUSTOM STATIONERY. OVERBAY’S DRESSMAKING & FITTING. GUTHRIE DRY GOODS & CLOTHING. ELVIN & NELSON ATTORNEYS AT LAW. And, sprinkled among those signs, others which gave cause for much of the reason for my existence in Laramie — the saloons. COMIQUE THEATRE AND DANCE HALL. RED ROSE SALOON — ICED BEER. LARAMIE SALOON AND SPORTING HALL.

  A half dozen side streets intersected Main, and those quieter streets were the places to find smaller hotels, blacksmiths, harness makers, and liveries.

  That was why, instead of enjoying my usual breakfast at the Chinaman’s cafe, I now walked along the wooden sidewalk, nodding at men, tilting my hat at ladies. I needed to visit each of those liveries, for the simple reason that Nichols had been a rancher.

  He would not travel without a horse, saddled or buggied. The very presence of his dead body showed that Nichols indeed had ridden into Laramie to enter a bank vault late at night.

  I’d found no horse tied outside of The First National. Perhaps that in itself was not a surprise. The last thing he would want is to have a passerby remember a horse with the Rocking N brand outside the bank he was robbing.

  Yet the horse had to be somewhere.

  If it was in one of the liveries, or if a hand who had stabled the horse for Nichols on his previous visits now recognized it somewhere tied to a rail on one of the streets, I might discover on that horse something— anything— to shed more light on the confusing issues that blanketed me.

  On the other hand, if a thorough search showed that the horse was not in town, I’d be able to make one of two conclusions. Either some third party had been stupid enough to take the horse, a good sign that Nichols and Calhoun had not been alone in the shootout in the vault. Or some stranger had stolen the horse from where it was tied awaiting the return that Nichols would never make.

  Of the two possibilities, the second was unlikely. In these parts, getting caught on another man’s horse almost always ended in a necktie party, no matter how good the excuse for riding a strange brand. If no trees could be found nearby, rope would be slung around a saddle horn, and the offender would hang as he was dragged behind the horse he’d stolen. In short, if you found a wandering horse, you stayed on yours, and headed with the stray horse in a direct line to the ranch it came from, or the nearest livery. That way, you were believed when you said the horse was on its return.

  It was not much to go on, and I knew it, but at least it was immediate action of some sort, this search for Nichols’ horse.

  Later, when I’d breathed plenty of outside air, walked hard all over town, and cleared my body of the cling of death, I might be able to enjoy a late breakfast. After, I’d take more — and likely futile — action by riding to the Rocking N to ask further questions.

  And given more time, maybe I’d be able to figure out something more useful to do about the double deaths.

  But I wasn’t hopeful about that possibility either.

  Chapter 5

  The pitch fork recently thrown at my feet still quivered in the ground, inches from the toes of my boots.

  “Men at the last three liveri
es say you run a good stable, that you’re an honest man,” I said to One-Arm Wilson as he hopped down from the wagon in front of me. “Hadn’t heard about your distinctive manner of greeting visitors.”

  Wilson chuckled. “Seen you coming. Knew who you were. Wanted to be able to tell my grandchildren I’d made a marshal jump.”

  He looked down to where he had stuck the pitchfork with a throw from the wagon. “It grieves me that I didn’t. What would it take, Marshal Keaton, to make you jump? A nicked toe?”

  I shook my head. “Quicker reactions on my part. And call me Sam.”

  I stuck out my left hand to shake a greeting. He returned it with the calloused grip of his own left hand. “Jake Wilson.”

  He chuckled again. “You needing quicker reactions? Not what I heard. Shooting two snakes clean out of the air, that ain’t the mark of a slow man.”

  “It’s the mark of a stupid one,” I said. “Until a judge rides through, I’m stuck with a phony preacher that don’t keep his mouth shut.”

  He nodded in sympathy. A broad-chested man of medium height with straw-filled blond hair and a blocky face, there was nothing remarkable about him. Except for his arms. I guessed it was for extra coolness during his work here in the warm, dark interior of the livery. He had torn the sleeves from the old shirt he wore. His left arm, sweat rivelets flowing down the tightened muscles, was massive. From the open doors at the front of the livery, I’d seen him atop the wagon just ahead between the stalls. He’d been pitching straw one-handed with the speed of two normal men. To do that, he had a sling nailed to the top of the pitchfork. It let him grasp the handle lower down with his left hand, and with the sling around his upper forearm, he was able to leverage the tines with considerable power.

  His right arm, however, was barely more than flesh over bone, as if all the muscle had been stripped away. The arm hung slack at his side. Marbled scars, like ugly red worms, covered the skin on the upper half of that arm.