GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK (Bear Haskell, U.S. Marshal Book 1)

by Peter Brandvold

  More running footsteps sounded. Zach Bennett ran out from the far side of the jailhouse, and stopped. He was flanked by his three sons—Cotton, Shane, and the tall, lanky Farrel. They all looked the worse for their encounter with Bear the day before. Especially Shane, who wore a thick, white bandage over his nose, and his eyes were badly swollen and discolored.

  “Bernadine, come away from there right now!” the elder Bennett shouted, pointing commandingly at his daughter.

  Haskell didn’t see any weapons on any of the Bennetts, but he aimed the cocked Schofield at them just in case. “Stay there, Bennett.” He looked down at Bernadine. “Tell me, Miss Bennett. Did your father and your brothers murder Miss Clara and her father to try to hide your relationship? Or did they send Krantz to do it?”

  “No!” Bernadine said, gazing up at him in shock. “No, it wasn’t like that!”

  “Bernadine!” her father barked. “Did you hear me, girl?”

  Haskell said, “Shut up, Bennett!” To Bernadine he said, “Tell me what happened.”

  Slowly, Bernadine rose to stand before Haskell though she still had to look up at him. She shook her head as she glanced at her father and brothers. “No. They didn’t kill Clara. I did.”

  “You?”

  “Bernadine!” yelled her father.

  She stared at Haskell as though in a daze. A thin sheen of tears closed over her eyes. Her voice grew thin. It quavered with emotion. “She didn’t want me anymore. She’d fallen for a drover. She said it so cold. So mean. Like we’d never meant anything to each other, when I thought we’d meant so much to each other. Everything! She demanded her ring back. Her mother’s ring. She’d given it to me. I wore it around my neck. We were behind her and her father’s cabin. I don’t know what came over me. I went into a rage. The next think I knew, I had a rock in my hand. The rock was bloody. And dear Clara lay at my feet. Dead.”

  Sobbing, Bernadine dropped to her knees. She cried into her hands.

  “Ah, Jesus Christ, Bernadine,” Zach Bennett lamented. “You didn’t need to tell him all that. You didn’t need to tell him a thing!”

  Ignoring him, Haskell kept his gaze on the girl. “Who killed her father? Who burned the ranch?”

  “Big Deal’s pards from out at the Quimberly spread.” This from Zach Bennett as he walked slowly toward his daughter, an expression of anguish on his haggard features.

  “Krantz,” Haskell said, half to himself.

  “He’s the foreman. They’re mostly a rustlin’ outfit. Old Man Quimberly’s been dead for years. His rawhiders stayed on, took over the place though they don’t know how to run a ranch. They’re rustlers and stage coach thieves.” Bennett dropped to a knee beside his daughter, and glanced up at Haskell. “What’ll they do to her? The law ... ?”

  “I reckon it’s up to a judge,” Haskell said. “That she confessed is a good thing. A judge might see the killing as a fit of passion, momentary insanity, maybe leave her at home. Living with what she did is likely punishment enough. I’ll put that in my report.” Haskell broke open his Schofield, shook the spent shells out of the cylinder, and began replacing them with fresh from his shell belt. “Is Krantz around?”

  Farrell Cotton said, “Him and the others are over at the Blind Pig.”

  Haskell thumbed the sixth shell into the Schofield’s cylinder, snapped the piece closed, spun the wheel, and dropped the big popper into its holster. He glanced at Big Deal. His heart twisted. Haskell had liked the kid. His having to kill him grieved him. Big Deal had wanted to be all things to all people. He must have loved Bernadine Bennett.

  Because of how Lou Cameron had turned out—drunk and mean—it hadn’t been all that hard for Big Deal to ambush him. Especially given how tightly wired Big Deal himself had been.

  Haskell looked around. Crazy damn little town out here in the middle of nowhere ...

  He retrieved his Henry from the privy then walked back through the jailhouse house office and out onto the main street. He looked around. The street could have been any street in any ghost town. Only, five horses stood tied to a hitch rack fronting a saloon on the town’s far side. He hadn’t noticed the horses before, as they were nearly out of sight around a slight bend.

  But he noticed them now.

  He could still feel that rope cutting into his neck. He could still hear the mocking laughter of the men who’d hanged him. If Suellen had shown up even a minute later, he’d been snuggling with the diamondbacks about now ...

  Jaws set hard with a growing inner fury, Haskell pumped a live round into the Henry’s action, off-cocked the hammer, set the rifle on his shoulder, and began walking west along the eerily quiet street.

  Again, he saw faces staring out at him from behind dirty windows.

  His boots crunched dirt and sand and finely churned horse apples. The breeze picked up sand from the street and blew it against building fronts. The blazing sun pushed through the crown of his hat, caused sweat to dribble down his cheeks before the dry air itself reclaimed it.

  He approached the Blind Pig. All five horses standing at the hitch rack turned their heads to regard him curiously. Haskell recognized every one of them. He saw now the brands on their withers—the letter ‘Q’ inside a circle.

  Circle Q.

  Haskell mounted the boardwalk fronting the rundown place and pushed through the batwings. He put his back to the wall on his left and turned to face the saloon’s five customers.

  They all sat together under a grizzly head mounted atop the far wall, playing poker. A young lady in a red corset sat on the knee of one of the men. She was the only one who’d seen Haskell so far. Her and the gray-headed, gray-bearded apron standing behind the bar at the back of the room, that was.

  The girl stared at Haskell while the men around her raised and called and tossed coins onto the table, oblivious. The girl placed her left hand atop the hatless head of the man whose leg she was perched on, and turned his head toward Haskell.

  The man’s eyes, at first annoyed, found Haskell, and widened.

  The man elbowed Krantz, who sat to his left.

  “What is it, Haney? Can’t you see—?”

  “Look there,” Haney said.

  Krantz followed Haney’s gaze with his own. Krantz said, “Hey!” and lurched up out of his chair. He kicked the chair, tripping, and nearly fell as he stumbled straight backward against the wall, directly beneath the grizzly head. “Hey, for chrissakes, what the fuck? Did she cut you down?”

  He pointed at Haskell, sort of crouched forward, regarding the lawman with bald horror in his belligerent eyes, upper lip curled bizarrely.

  The others looked at Haskell and froze, lower jaws hanging.

  The kid, Willie, sat with his back to Haskell, but he was turned around in his chair now, staring in shock. “Fuck, we kilt that big son of a bitch!” To Haskell, he said, “What are you—a damn ghost?”

  “Close,” Bear growled. “Too damn close. You’re right. The woman who scared you fellers off cut me down about one minute before you’d have been scot-free.”

  He strode forward, switching his Henry to his left hand and setting it atop that shoulder. He wanted his right hand free for his Schofield. This would be close-range work here today ...

  He stopped ten feet away from the poker table, all eyes riveted on him.

  “You fellers are under arrest for the murder of Bliss Lomax and for the attempted murder of a deputy United States marshal. That’d be me. That should bring you about fifteen years hard labor in the federal pen. If you want to make things simpler for yourself as well as for me, go ahead.” Haskell curled his lip into a challenging grin. “I’d advise against it, but you ain’t payin’ me for advice, now, are ya?”

  Willie’s eyes grew brighter. His mouth opened wider.

  He bolted up out of his chair, screaming and reaching for the Colt hanging down over his crotch.

  Haskell’s Schofield bucked and roared.

  The bullet split Willie’s brisket wide, turned to pulp his
heart behind it, and threw Willie straight up and then back onto the poker table where he lay shivering as though deeply chilled. The whore scrambled off Haney’s knee and ran up the stairs to disappear, sobbing, in the saloon’s second story.

  The four surviving cutthroats stared down at Willie in horror.

  Silence settled over the room.

  Smoke from Haskell’s Schofield drifted up in front of his face.

  “Anyone else?” he asked.

  They stared at him hard, shoulders rising and falling as they breathed, cursing under their breath.

  Then, by ones and twos, they emptied their holsters onto the table until a small armory of weapons—guns as well as knives—was piled amongst the playing cards, coins, greenbacks, whiskey bottles, and cigarette stubs smoldering in ashtrays.

  Haskell told the North Star’s barkeep to fetch the undertaker for Big Deal, then led Krantz and the others away to Lou Cameron’s jail and locked them up in the basement cellblock. His life would have been easier if he’d been able to turn them all toe-down. That would just mean paperwork. As it was now, he’d have to haul them all cuffed and shackled back to Denver to face a federal judge.

  On the other hand, for the next fifteen-to-twenty years he was going to enjoy thinking about them turning big rocks into small rocks in the quarries at the federal pen ...

  Bear and his charges wouldn’t be heading back to Denver real soon, however. He’d be stuck here in Diamondback for several more weeks, maybe a month. He had to seat another lawman and wait for the circuit judge to ride out here and try Bernadine Bennett for the killing of her lover, Clara Lomax.

  That was all right, Bear thought, climbing the stone steps to the main office, the keys jangling on the ring in his hand. He could use some quiet time to cool his heels and drink some whiskey.

  Maybe with some extra time here in Diamondback, he could take more care with his report and give Henry Dade all that detail he was always barking for.

  Haskell stepped into the office and locked the cellblock door behind him. He turned to the main door, which he’d left half open when he’d herded Krantz’s bunch into the building. The pretty dove, Miss Marlene, was just now walking toward the jailhouse from the far side of the street.

  She wore very little, and her hair was done up nice. Red rouge colored her cheeks. She cradled a bottle in the crook of her right arm. In her other hand she carried two whiskey glasses.

  Halfway across the street, she looked up to see Bear staring out at her. She stopped, held up the bottle and the glasses, cocked her head to one side, and cast him one hell of an enticing grin.

  Haskell chuckled.

  He had a feeling he was going to enjoy these next couple of weeks in Diamondback, indeed.

  He drew the door wide. “Get in here, darlin’. If you’re not a sight for these sore eyes, I don’t know what is!” He winced, swallowed, turned his head this way and that. “And this sore neck ... ”

  “I got just what the doctor ordered,” Marlene said as she flounced through the door and kissed his cheek. She gave a sad frown. “I’m sorry you had to shoot Big Deal. I just knew that was coming, though.”

  “Yeah, well ... ”

  She smiled again, an innocent waif on gossamer wings. “Like I said, I got just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Yes, you do,” Haskell said, looking at her in all her female splendor. “Yes, you surely do!”

  Western novelist Peter Brandvold was born and raised in North Dakota. He has penned over 90 fast-action westerns under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. He is the author of the ever-popular .45-Caliber books featuring Cuno Massey as well as the Lou Prophet and Yakima Henry novels. The Ben Stillman books are a long-running series with previous volumes available as ebooks. Recently, Brandvold published two horror westerns—Canyon of a Thousand Eyes and Dust of the Damned. Head honcho at “Mean Pete Publishing,” publisher of lightning-fast western ebooks, he has lived all over the American west but currently lives in western Minnesota. Visit his website at www.peterbrandvold.com. Follow his blog at: www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com.