by Ralph Cotton
“Yep,” said the clerk, “the reward was enough to get those two back on their feet real quick. They left here talking about a farm in Missouri, him with his busted ribs still bound up tighter than a Jersey hat band. Imagine that. They went from mucking stalls for grub money to buying a farm in Missouri, of all the damned luck!”
Sam recalled Lockhart saying he’d hidden the two sacks of money, but he’d never heard him say whether or not he hid the sacks together. So he decided to let the matter drop. “Good for them,” he said sincerely. He and Hector turned and walked out the door.
As they stepped up into their saddles, Sam gave the Mexican lawman a bemused look. “The only thing certain about luck is that it can change any minute.”
“S’í, this is true,” said Hector. They turned their horses to the dirt street and rode away, the hum and roar of the mines falling away behind them.
Chapter 26
Memphis Beck stood at the buckboard, walking cane in hand, knowing that there were eyes on him from the wooded hillside to his right. He would not have been able to explain how he knew he was being watched, but he knew it. He might not have realized it any other place in the world. But here, in his own yard, his own lair so to speak, he told himself, oh yes, somebody was over there. . . .
When Clarimonde walked out of the cabin, down from the porch, she stopped and looked at him. Then she studied him closer before stepping up into the buckboard, noting the troubled expression on his brow. “Warren, are you all right?” she asked.
He wasn’t about to say anything and draw her attention toward the woods. “Well, let me see,” he said coolly, “I’ve had all our explosives stolen, I’ve been chased, shot in the back. . . .”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said with her trace of a German accent. She reached a hand up and patted his cheek. That looked good, he thought, to whoever was watching him in his own front yard.
“Sorry,” he said, assisting her up into the driver’s seat by her forearm, and stepping back instead of walking around and stepping up beside her. “The fact is I’m not feeling so good today.” He shrugged. “Would you mind if I sat this one out for a while? Tell Bart and Etta I’ll be along later when I’m feeling better?”
Clarimonde looked at him, the reins in her hand. She started to question the matter, but something in his eyes warned her not to. What was at play here? She wondered, but she didn’t ask. “Yes, I’ll do that,” she said. “Are you sure I shouldn’t stay here, wait until you’re—”
“No, please, you go on,” he said.
She understood. “Well, all right . . .” She gave the horse a light touch of the buckboard reins and rode away down the winding hill to the trail below, wanting to look back, but not allowing herself to do so.
Beck stood watching her circle onto the trail and out of sight. After making sure she wasn’t being followed, he walked into the barn, checked his Colt and peeped out through a crack in the plank wall. He waited, and waited, but no one showed themselves. All right, had he been wrong? He didn’t think so, but it was possible. He had been off his game lately, he reminded himself, the gunshot wound . . .
Instead of leaving the barn directly, he left through a rear door that led out into the start of the thick woods surrounding the cabin. Even with the pain in his back, he walked up high into the woods before circling back down to the cabin. As an extra precaution, instead of walking around to the front porch, he climbed in through the bedroom window and sat down on the edge of the feather bed for a few minutes.
Maybe he had been wrong, he thought, letting his eyes close in his weariness. If he could just sit here for a while, catch his breath, get some strength back. He drifted, gun in hand, knowing that the closed bedroom door would warn him if anybody slipped into the house while he wasn’t watching. A man had to rest sometime. . . .
What . . . ? His head snapped up with a start. He’d been asleep? How long? He stood up, knowing he had let his guard down too far. Had he heard something? Was that what awakened him, a sound from out there? He stared at the closed bedroom door, his thumb poised over the hammer of the Colt. He sighed and walked to the door and opened it. He’d have to be more careful. No, not more careful, he told himself. As careless as this was, maybe he needed to quit for good.
At the front window he gazed out, back and forth as far as his line of vision would allow. Luckily he’d been wrong, he thought. But it never hurt to play it cautious, did it? He lowered the Colt and took his thumb from the hammer. He stepped over to a cupboard and took down a bottle of rye and a tin coffee cup. He set them side by side on the table.
One drink, he told himself, then he’d saddle a horse and ride on, meet up with Clarimonde along the trail. But as he started to sit down, he looked at a plate lying on the table, another plate lying upside down covering it. Without sitting, he stared at the plate as he pulled the cork from the rye and poured the tin cup half full. Then he set the bottle down and raised the top plate enough to peep under it.
Jerky, eh? Well, how considerate of her, he told himself, taking the top plate off and laying it aside. He looked all around cagily. How downright sweet . . .
Just inside the woods to the right of the cabin, Conning Glick, the Dutchman, straightened the long, dirty yellow scalp wig atop his head and placed his hat down over it. It would have been nice if the woman was here. But that was all right, he told himself. She’d return sooner or later, and with Beck’s men away, he had plenty of time to get to know her before he killed her.
He grinned wide into the palm of his hand as if it were a mirror. He took out a watch and checked it again, the way he had checked it every few minutes for the past half hour. He hoped Beck went for the bait. That would give him some time to sit and chat, watch the outlaw’s face as he drew out his long knife and explained what was going to happen next. But whether Beck took the bait or not, it didn’t really matter. The Dutchman had his throwing knife and a big black-handled Remington. He would have the drop on Beck going in.
It would have been nice if things had gone the way he’d planned them with the Lowden woman. She was supposed to have gone to Beck and sent the willful train robber right to him. It would have been more poetic and meaningful that way. But what the hell, he told himself with a pale, thin smile. Poetry, and the big Lowden woman aside, Beck was a dead man, bait or no. Glick had tracked him, here, into his own lair.
When Glick reached the front porch, the big Remington in hand, he stepped up and walked along the planks, keeping close to the cabin front, to silence any creaking in his footsteps. At the front window, he stopped and peeped in, long enough to see Beck sitting there, as still as stone.
So far, so good . . . He glanced at the plate on the table where he’d laid out three slices of jerked meat. Only now there were just one and a half pieces. Half a piece of the deadly jerky lay on the tabletop, only an inch from Beck’s relaxed fingertips. Perfect!
At the table, Beck saw the door handle lift and the door swing open slowly. But he could only sit staring, unmoving as Glick stepped inside with the Remington poised, out and cocked. “Mr. Warren ‘Memphis’ Beck, at long last,” he said, leaving the door open behind him. “It appears that I have finally salted your tail feathers.” He stepped forward. “You will not fly away.” He gave his faint grin.
Beck appeared to try and say something. But Glick saw his struggle and stared into his drooping eyes. “Don’t bother. I know how difficult it is for you to do most anything right now.” He let the hammer down on the Remington, laid it on the table and sat down in a chair facing Beck. “I should have come in sooner, given us some time to converse. But, well”—he shrugged—“better late than never, I suppose.”
“What’s that, Memphis Beck?” Glick asked playfully. Then, as if replying to Beck, he said, “Oh, I don’t mind if I do. Gracias.” He picked up the tin cup of rye and turned back a stout drink. “I have never seen a good reason to let whiskey go undrunk, have you?”
Beck only stared, his eyes drooping, his fa
ce too relaxed for a man facing his killer. “How—how much?” he said with much effort.
“Oh, you can still speak?” Glick said in half-mock surprise. He cocked a hairless brow and said, “For your head, ten thousand dollars.” He sat back, raised the tin cup as if in a toast and took another drink. “But that was only for me. Nobody else would get that. But then nobody else seemed able to ever catch you, now did they?”
Beck only stared, looking like a man bored by a long-winded speech. A string of saliva formed on his lip and ran down onto his chin.
“No indeed,” said Glick, raising a long pale finger in his fingerless black gloves and wagging it back and forth for emphasis. “That is the price my special service demands.” He took another long drink and ran his pale finger across his lips. “But of course, you realize what I must do to command such a price.” He paused and gave Beck a knowing look. “I’ll have to take your head to them. They stipulated that I must cut it off while you’re alive. So don’t feel like I’m picking on you. It’s just another part of the job.” He let out a short, dark chuckle.
From outside the open window both Glick and Beck heard the buckboard coming back up the winding path to the cabin.
“Well well, guess who’s coming home?” Glick said, slumping a bit, the whiskey relaxing him, smoothing him out, making him a little more congenial than usual, he decided.
Beck sat silent and as motionless as stone, but in his mind he shouted, Oh no, Clair, not now. Not now of all times!
As if hearing Beck’s thoughts, the Dutchman spoke without his terrible grin, but rather with a dark scowl on his pale, hairless face. “We’ll just wait until she walks in here, and I’ll let you see how much fun a woman can be at a time like this. My employers will get a great deal of satisfaction out of it when I tell them.”
Please, Clair, no! Not now. What are you doing back here? Beck pleaded in his mind.
Out front, Clarimonde stopped the buckboard and sniffed the foul smell in the air. She stepped down, but instead of walking inside straightaway, she followed the rancid smell to the edge of the woods where Glick had left his horse and the pack mule when he’d moved up closer. From the mule’s back hung the blood-blackened bag of heads, a swirl of flies humming above it. Seeing it, she froze, but only for a moment.
Hurrying back to the buckboard as quietly as possible, she slipped the shotgun from under the wooden seat, checked it, cocked both hammers and eased her way toward the front door.
At the table, the two men had listened in silence, Beck realizing that it had taken her longer than he’d thought. He stared at Glick. Easy, Clair . . . Watch your step. . . .
But Clair did not take it easy. She threw the door open and jumped inside with the shotgun pointed and ready. Beck sat poised, watching for Glick’s next move. When none came, Beck let out a breath and said in a relieved and normal voice, “Take it easy, Clair, his poison has kicked in.” He reached over, picked up the big Remington and held it on his lap.
Glick had a sad, stunned, bewildered look on his pale face. Looking into his eyes, seeing the question there, Beck said, “She wouldn’t have left any food out for me, Glick. She thought I was going with her.”
Clarimonde’s shotgun came down. She sighed with relief. “What poison? What food? What is going on here, Warren?”
“Clair, this is Conning Glick, the Dutchman,” Beck said. “The one we told you about, the one who wanted to take my head for the railroad bounty.”
“Are we safe?” Clair asked hesitantly.
“We are now.” As Beck spoke, he blotted the saliva from his lips with his sleeve and nodded at the poison jerky, both what was left on the plate as well as the piece lying on the tabletop. “There’s his poison, some of it anyway.” He looked at Clair, as if to assure her that everything was well under control; then he turned a cold stare into Glick’s drooping eyes. “The other piece is in the tin cup where I had it soaking while I waited for him to join me.”
Glick made a sound in his chest as if he wanted to cry, but could not. With all his waning strength he tried to nod toward the big Remington in Beck’s hand. But he could move nothing more than his eyes, and only a little at that.
“Clair, would you mind taking the buckboard to the barn?” Beck asked quietly.
Clarimonde leaned the shotgun against the wall. “Of course, I’ll do that.” She turned and walked out the door.
When she was gone, Beck turned to the Dutchman. “So, you want me to take the Remington and end it for you? You don’t want to sit there and face death the way all of those other poor devils had to do?”
The Dutchman couldn’t move, but Beck read the pleading in his eyes.
Beck cocked the Remington and sat back in his chair. He let out a breath as if considering it. Finally he gave a sweeping gesture toward the plank floor. “I would, but as you can see, this floor just had a good scrubbing yesterday.”
Glick made another strange sound in his throat. Beck stood up, uncocked the Remington and shoved it down into his waist. He pushed his chair under the table, leaned his hands on the chair back and said, “The mistake you made was coming here for me, Glick.”
The Dutchman gurgled and tipped sideways an inch, still hearing the words, but unable to respond in any manner.
“You never want to come into a man’s lair like this, alone, him expecting you, him knowing that you’re out to kill him.” He paused, and thought of the ranger, the day Sam or Hector had knocked him senseless to keep him from doing that very same thing. “I learned that the hard way.” He paused and thought about it. “You’d never believe who taught me that.” He paused again and shook his head. “Hell, I doubt if even I will ever understand why.”
He walked to the open door and looked out across the wild, rugged land. No, this wasn’t the time for him to give it up. What had he been thinking? He was just now in his prime, playing at the top of his game. Behind him he heard the Dutchman’s body hit the floor, dead.
“I still owe you one, Ranger—I mean, Sam,” Memphis Beck said to a broad-winged hawk as he watched the big hunter glide in a long circle on the distant horizon.
