Hangtown

by Paul Lederer

  ‘Virgil Sly, the notorious badman taking shelter behind a woman’s skirts,’ Liza shot back.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ Sly said after due consideration. ‘There’s a reason we come to be called notorious. Thank you for making up my mind. I’ll take you. Let these … others sit here and cry in their lace handkerchiefs.’

  ‘No you don’t!’ Cora Kellogg who had been trying to help Cherry shouted, ‘Not the child. Take me, Sly.’

  ‘You heard me, ma’am. I don’t think this is time for a debate. I’m taking the youngster and going to the stable. Your man with the banjo is going to hitch up the surrey and I’m leaving town with the girl at my side.’ His voice dropped to a low menace. ‘Make sure no one follows after. It wouldn’t be good for her safety.’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’ Cora said, striding forward, hands on her ample hips.

  ‘Of course I would, ma’am,’ Sly replied, refilling his whiskey glass. ‘I’m quite – what did she say, notorious? – to my very core if my own well-being is in the balance.’

  ‘You’re cruel!’ Cora shrieked.

  Sly drank his whiskey and only smiled. ‘Yes. Notorious and cruel. Do you think that a good woman could change me?’

  If Sly’s expression could be called a smile, it was the most evil smile Cora had ever seen. She had no doubt that Virgil Sly would do whatever it took to achieve his ends.

  ‘All right,’ Cora said trying to appease the homicidal Sly, ‘I’ll go along with you and tell Gus to harness the team.’

  ‘That’s all right, ma’am, I’m sure the little girl here can speak. I can’t see why we’d need your assistance.’

  Sly reached out a hand and grabbed Liza’s arm, pulling her to him. ‘Let’s get going,’ Sly said. To the others he said, ‘You ladies stay here and stay quiet. Understand?’

  Sly had entered by the saloon’s back door. Now, however, with Liza as a hostage, he chose to leave from the front of the building. On the porch he paused for a minute to allow his eyes to adjust to the brilliant sunlight and to sweep the street with his eyes for Wage Carson. Where had the big deputy gotten to?

  Satisfied that the way was clear, he shoved Liza on ahead of him and marched behind her toward the stable, gun held loosely beside his leg. ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ Sly said with soft menace. ‘I’d hate to have to nick you and have to carry you.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ Liza found the courage to ask.

  ‘That depends on a number of things – mostly on how far anyone tries to pursue me.’

  ‘The marshal will come after you,’ Liza said forcefully. ‘He’ll never quit as long as I’m with you.’

  ‘He’d better think that through twice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ Sly said, ‘which way puts you in more danger? If he comes there will be shooting. If he leaves me alone I’ll probably just drop you off a few miles down the trail.’

  ‘You promise that?’

  ‘No. I don’t make promises, girl. Just remember to do as you’re told and you should make out all right. I don’t want to carry any extra baggage on the trail.’

  They made their way to the relative coolness of the stable under a white sky and eased into the shadows of the building, Sly letting his eyes search every square inch of the building before he was satisfied. Liza, just behind him, her arm still in his grip, trembled slightly. She did not like this man.

  ‘What is it?’ Gus Travers asked, peering out of the canvas flap at the rear of the Conestoga wagon. ‘I thought I heard someone. Oh, it’s you again! Didn’t get far, did you?’

  ‘I will this time. What’d you say your name was?’ Sly demanded.

  ‘Gus,’ Travers said with an uneasy glance at Liza who was obviously being restrained.

  ‘Come on out of there, Gus.’ Sly ordered him. ‘Don’t get any ideas of gunplay.’

  ‘Mister, as I told you before, I haven’t a weapon of any kind, except my banjo. Though some people say my playing kills them.’

  No one smiled in response to the weak joke.

  ‘Just clamber on down,’ Sly told him. ‘I need you to hitch up that surrey out back. I assume those matched blacks are the team for it.’

  ‘They are,’ Gus answered. Rumpled, bleary-eyed after the long night and the morning’s excitement, he clambered from the wagon, hitching up his suspenders over scrawny shoulders. ‘Did Miss Cora give you anything by way of instructions for me?’

  ‘She did,’ Sly said in a low voice. ‘She told me just to keep jabbing the muzzle of this Colt into your belly until you did what I asked.’

  ‘Oh, it’s like that, is it?’ Gus said.

  Liza interceded, ‘Just do it, Gus, please!’

  Gus hesitated, then said, ‘All right, Liza.’

  ‘Be quick about it,’ Sly said, ‘and quiet. Take the horses out back and we’ll follow you.’ They did follow Gus as he walked the matched black horses to the sun-bright alley where the surrey stood, but Sly, still holding Liza’s arm in an iron grip, did not emerge from the shadows. He stood watching with his wolf eyes as the old man went about his work.

  ‘Is there any water in here?’ Sly asked Liza.

  ‘I don’t know. There must be, for the horses.’

  ‘Find the water. Find a canteen and fill it,’ Sly ordered as he suddenly released Liza, shoving her away from him. ‘It’s going to be a long hot day.’

  Liza stood rubbing her bruised arm. ‘All right. I’ll try.’

  Sly saw her eyes shifting to the double doors standing open at the front of the stable. ‘Don’t even think about running away,’ he warned her.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about anything except where to find a canteen,’ Liza answered.

  ‘Of course you weren’t,’ Sly said, stepping so near to Liza that she had to lean her head far back to look up into those savage eyes. His voice was nearly a whisper as he touched her shoulder as if with fondness and said, ‘I once lived with a woman who looked something like you. We got along fine. Then one day she threw a little tantrum over something petty – I had told her to do something and she refused. She winged a half brick at my head.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ Liza asked weakly.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sly asked cruelly. ‘Just do what I tell you, is all I’m saying, and we’ll get along.’

  Gus’s nimble fingers were accustomed to the work he had been assigned and within another ten minutes the black horses had been hitched to Cora Kellogg’s surrey. ‘What now?’ the old man asked, returning to the stable, dusting his hands together.

  ‘Why don’t you just crawl back up into the wagon and see how quiet you can be,’ Sly said in a low growl. ‘If you were lying to me about not having a gun, don’t make the mistake of trying to use it.’

  ‘I wasn’t lying, and I wouldn’t try to use a weapon on you if I had one,’ Gus replied. ‘But mister, can’t you see your way clear to let the girl go now? You’ve got what you wanted.’

  Sly didn’t bother to answer. He gestured with his Colt, and Gus trudged across the stable to crawl up into the covered wagon again.

  Liza had returned with a wooden canteen. ‘I don’t know how good the water is,’ she told Sly. ‘They were holding it in a rain barrel back there.’

  ‘Any water’s good water when you have none,’ Sly said. He had ridden the desert too long to underrate its value. If it was a little brackish, too bad, but it was better than feeling your tissues slowly dry up, your tongue cleave to your palate, your throat grow constricted, your lips parch and split.

  He did not think that he would have to travel far on that canteen. Jay Champion was also a veteran desert raider and he certainly would not leave the seep without full water-bags. Sly only had to get on to the trail to meet him. There was only the one way out of Hangtown. A few miles down the road the trail forked. The southern route led to Tucson, where they would most definitely not be heading since they still held the bank’s money. The other angled westward, in the direction, he believed, of a pa
tchwork settlement called Arroyo Verde. Although neither Sly nor Jay had ever ridden that way, that would be the direction he would take. Jay would be along. Champion was his friend and would never cross Virgil Sly. And. …

  Sly was the last man in the world he would wish to make an enemy of.

  ‘Let’s have at it, girl,’ Sly said, slinging the canteen over his shoulder.

  Clambering aboard in the sweltering heat Liza clasped her hands together between her knees, wishing for Wage Carson’s rescue even as she prayed that he would not come. Sly would gun Wage down as soon as he saw the glint of the marshal’s badge Wage Carson wore. Fearful though she was, Liza was nearly convinced that Sly would let her go once he had reached the safety of the long desert. After all, what further use did he have for her?

  Sly slapped the reins against the glistening flanks of the matched black horses and the surrey lurched into motion.

  The moment he heard the horses start, Gus leaped from the rear of the Conestoga and in a staggering run, made his way across the street toward the marshal’s office. He was not a coward, he told himself. There was nothing at all he could have done to stop Virgil Sly. But he was not going to let the badman make off with Liza, sweet young woman that she was. Gus was very fond of the girl. There was no telling what a man like Sly might decide to do to her, given the time to consider the possibilities. There was little that was beneath Virgil Sly. Gus had seen his kind before.

  Wage Carson had been explaining to Josh Banks, ‘I chased him into the alley in back of the stable, but he just vanished. I decided to come back and check on you. I saw Sly firing at you, saw you take a tumble.’

  ‘His lead didn’t touch me,’ Josh said. ‘But it was damned close.’

  ‘Where do you think …?’

  Wage looked around as Gus, panting with the exertion and the hot thin air of the day, burst into the marshal’s office. Josh Banks rose from his desk, his weathered face drawn down with concern.

  ‘What is it, Gus?’ Josh asked.

  ‘Liza,’ Gus gasped, leaning against the wall, holding his tortured chest. ‘Sly’s got her.’

  ‘Got her?’ Wage Carson said with cold fury. ‘Where? What do you mean?’ For a moment Gus thought the brawny young marshal was going to hurl himself upon him. There was a fierceness in Wage’s eyes he had never seen before.

  ‘Sly made his way back to the stable. He’s breaking for open desert in Cora’s surrey, and he’s got Liza with him as a hostage.’

  ‘How did …?’ Josh began and then realized it was not the time for questions. Wage was already nearly to the door, snatching up his hat and rifle in passing. ‘Wage!’ Josh said in a nearly pleading tone. ‘Be careful.’

  Wage paused briefly at the open doorway to glare back at them. ‘Save that advice for Virgil Sly. He had damned well better be careful, because if any harm comes to Liza I’ll track him till I drop, if it takes following him to hell.’

  NINE

  Laredo frowned in concentration. The knoll on which he had positioned himself was littered with pocked, reddish volcanic rock and studded with scattered cholla – jumping cactus – their cat-whisker spines silver in the sunlight. Along the flanks of the knoll several tall, dry yucca plants stood, their white flowers faded and curled now, their seed pods brown and splitting.

  Laredo was crouched in the only shade available – that cast by the body of his buckskin horse – peering down at the desert flats surrounding Hangtown. The four-passenger surrey was approaching him across the barren white sand.

  Did that mean that the women had abandoned all hope of success in the ghost town? The black horses drawing the buggy were no larger than insects at this distance. There was a time when Laredo had carried field glasses in his saddle bags. He no longer did, having decided that he was always going to have to draw nearer to his target to make a real assessment of the situation anyway. Just now he wished he had not given up the habit.

  He restrained his curiosity and returned his gaze to the shadow at the base of the dark mesa. Jay Champion would have to make his run soon, and Champion was Laredo’s objective. That and the bank money he would be carrying. Five years into this job Laredo had failed his employers only twice, and each time his failure had brought guilt and depression on its heels. Not that the bank examiner’s office had ever reprimanded him; they knew that occasional failure was inevitable. Laredo, however, took failure quite personally and would relive each move he had made endlessly in his mind, wondering where he had made his mistake.

  It wasn’t that complicated, really. Once he had simply been outsmarted, the second time completely overmatched by the number of robbers he had been pursuing: the episode in Scottsdale when they had outflanked him and gunned him down in the street. Still, failure rankled.

  He did not mean to fail again.

  Where was Champion? For that matter, where was Wage Carson? He had heard shots earlier, but there had been no movement that he could see near the mesa. The weapons’ reports had come from the town, then. Had someone managed to shoot down the young marshal? Wage had been told to keep an eye on the outlaw camp, but suppose he had been drawn off by someone? He might have drifted over to visit the little black-haired girl he was so obviously crazy about. Or perhaps one of the remaining soldiers harbored some sort of grudge against the marshal and had gone to shooting … there was no point in speculating. There were too many possibilities.

  Laredo determined that all that he could do was stick to the plan and keep watch for Jay Champion. The marshal would have to fend for himself.

  He rose suddenly to his feet as the surrey swung westward. For now, emerging from the town limits of Hangtown, he saw a pursuer. The man, wide and thick, rode a gray horse, and he was riding hard. Why would Wage Carson be chasing the surrey? Something was up. Laredo settled his hat on his head and swung aboard the patient buckskin, starting it toward the western trail.

  From the heavy shadow cast by the looming mesa, Jay Champion stood staring into the distances. His sorrel horse munched listlessly on the dry buffalo grass there. The black surrey had been driven out of town moments before, at breakneck speed before slowing on the long flats. That made no sense. If the women had been leaving Hangtown, they wouldn’t have been in that much of a hurry. Besides, he had seen the figures of only two people riding the wagon. Unless something had happened to two of the women, something that had frightened them enough to leave town on the run … there was no point in speculating.

  Minutes later Jay saw the thick figure of the marshal, rushing his gray horse toward the head of the town, pursuing the surrey. Who was he chasing? Again, there was no point in guessing about events. All that mattered was that the marshal was gone, in no position to trap Jay. The soldiers, if there were any left around, hadn’t shown their heads. Jay Champion smiled with satisfaction. There was no one at all left to try to stop him.

  It was time to make his break.

  He gathered the reins to his sorrel and swung heavily aboard. He didn’t worry about Sly. Virgil would know where he was heading. And, whatever the savage little man was up to, Sly would need no help in handling it. Jay Champion started down the hill, emerging from the deep shadows into the bright desert sunlight and struck out for the western trail toward Arroyo Verde.

  Wage Carson’s anger had cooled enough so that he could now force himself to slow the gray horse before running it to death. His anger had cooled, but not his determination. Nothing would happen to Liza – he would not allow it. Grimly he rode on across the rough ground and sandy washes. Sly had made his direction clear. He was taking the western road. A man on horseback might have eluded Wage, but the surrey needed to follow an established road. It was of no use over the broken ground beside the trail.

  Recognizing this, Wage was able to gain on them. He did not need to wait until the road met the junction. Riding across country he could, with luck, reach the Arroyo Verde cut-off before Sly could.

  The sun was white-hot on his back, the going rough over volcanic earth. The
gray horse now and then tossed its head with annoyance, not liking the footing, but Wage urged the animal on. Dipping down into a wash, Wage found himself in a tangle of dry willow brush. He cursed as he fought his way through it. He had now lost sight of the surrey, but drove the horse on doggedly. He cursed himself for losing time in the long thicket, but he knew his instincts were correct. If he did not reach the road again in time to find himself ahead of Sly and Liza, then he would at least have gained much ground on them.

  And that was enough. Sly might be quicker with a gun, a surer shot, but feeling as he did now, Wage would not hesitate to walk into the badman’s sights and take lead if that was what it took to free Liza.

  At last fighting free of the brushy tangle, Wage emerged on to the flats once again, in time to see the surrey, trailing dust, approaching him not a hundred yards off. He levered a cartridge into the receiver of his Winchester and sat his shuddering gray horse, waiting.

  Laredo had watched the drama unfolding on the flats below him, and now he saw the big young marshal waiting for the approaching surrey. Still not sure who was riding in the carriage, Laredo frowned, spat drily and determined to go down to see if Wage Carson needed some help.

  A moment later he had his mind changed for him.

  The lone rider was slapping spurs to the big sorrel horse he rode. He too was heading toward the Arroyo Verde cut-off. It wasn’t hard for Laredo to recognize the man even at this distance. He had been trailing Jay Champion for days.

  Whatever work Wage Carson had cut out for himself, he would have to handle it alone. Capturing Champion and recovering the bank money took priority over all else. That was what they hired him to do, and he did not mean to trail back into Tucson ever again with the black mark of failure on him.

  Laredo started his buckskin horse down the flank of the rocky knoll.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Liza heard Virgil Sly mutter. A string of oaths followed as the gunman yanked back the reins so hard that the suddenness of it caused one of the surprised blacks to rear high, pawing at the air.