The Last Days of Wolf Garnett

by Clifton Adams

  Gault twisted in the saddle and saw the short man coming toward them from a thicket farther upstream. When he was close enough to be heard, the short man said, "My advice is do like Colly tells you. He may not look right bright, but there ain't many men hereabouts that can best him with a rifle."

  Colly. The name struck a spark in Gault's mind. He remembered the two pals of Wolf Garnett's that the sheriff had mentioned. One had been Colly Fay. The other Shorty Pike. Two harmless drovers working a herd up the Western Trail to Dodge, the sheriff had said. Two ignorant farm boys who had fallen in with bad company for a while. But they had seen the error of their ways and turned back to the path of honesty and truth—according to Sheriff Grady Olsen. Gault wondered if Sheriff Olsen would be surprised if he could have seen his two farm boys now, both of them with snub-barreled rifles pointed at Gault's chest.

  Gault did not look at the rifles. He did his best to act and talk as if they were not there at all. "You boys strayed pretty far from bedground, looks like. Sheriff Olsen seemed to figger you'd gone back to drivin' cattle, after you took it on yourselves to ride over to New Boston and identify Wolf Garnett's body."

  Colly Fay continued to smile abstractedly. Shorty Pike shrugged his shoulders and casually slipped his saddle gun back in its boot. "We won't go into that now. Just say we changed our mind."

  All right, Gault thought, let's see what kind of cards you're holding! He glanced toward the field of green corn and asked, "Is that the Garnett place?"

  Shorty took a deep breath and made a quiet decision of his own. "That what you been lookin' for? The Garnett place?"

  Gault made himself smile. "Just wonderin'. Curiosity, you might say."

  The muzzle of Colly's rifle moved a fraction of an inch, as if hunting the exact center of Gault's chest. Shorty folded his hands on the saddle horn and looked at Gault and said nothing. Apparently the next move would come from another direction.

  "Look," Gault said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, "I don't know why folks are so dead set against lettin' me talk to Wolf Garnett's sister. I don't aim to pester her or give her any more grief than she's already come in for. All I want is to talk to her about her brother."

  "Why?"

  "I want to satisfy myself that Wolf Garnett is dead."

  Shorty glanced at his partner and smiled. He touched his forehead with his finger to suggest that Gault was more than a little loco. Colly Fay chuckled absently and nodded.

  A third rider approached silently along Gault's backtrail. He swung down toward the river and came toward them through a grove of cottonwoods. Gault turned cautiously to look at him—and somehow he was not surprised when he saw that it was Standard County's only full-time deputy sheriff, Dub Finley.

  Gault leaned forward on the saddle horn and said dryly, "I don't guess you boys rode all this way just to give me back my .45, did you?"

  Finley shot a look at Shorty Pike, and the squarest little man said, "We never stopped him until we seen he was makin' straight for the farm."

  The deputy frowned and his hairline pointed down the center of his forehead. "What are you after, Gault?"

  What was he after? Gault had asked himself the question many times, and he still wasn't sure of the answer. Revenge? Satisfaction? Justice? He didn't know. He only knew that there was a wild thing inside that would not let him rest—and maybe, if he could be sure that Wolf Garnett was dead, the thing could be tamed and lived with. But all he said to the deputy was, "I want to ask Wolf's sister some questions."

  "All the folks that count," the deputy said bluntly, "have already asked their questions. Representatives of the express company and the cattlemen's association, that had bounties on Wolf's head. County lawmen and U.S. marshals that had warrants for his arrest. Newspaper writers from all over. For almost three days Esther had questions throwed at her from ever' which way—almost more'n a woman could stand. It got her so upset she couldn't even come to New Boston for the funeral." Dub Finley wanted to be the cool, efficient and responsible lawman that he imagined himself to be, but he was by nature hotheaded and impulsive. In spite of himself, his voice was slowly rising up the scale of anger. "What I'm sayin', Gault, is she's had enough. She ain't goin' to be plagued with any more questions. Not while I'm deputy here."

  "What does Sheriff Olsen say about it?"

  Finley smiled unpleasantly. "Me and the sheriff see alike on this." Again he made an effort to rein himself in. "I'm sorry about what happened to your wife. But that was almost a year ago. And Wolf Garnett's dead. My advice is forget it, Gault."

  Forget it. Pretend the sweaty nightmares weren't there. Pretend that Martha was still radiant and warm and that her murder had never happened. "Forgettin'," he said with a curious flatness, "ain't an easy thing to do."

  "I guess," the young deputy said unfeelingly, "it's somethin' you'll have to learn." He brushed some trail dust from his pony hide vest. This reminded him how long he had been out trailing Gault, and how long it had been since he had had hot food or proper rest, and this realization whetted his pugnaciousness to a fine edge. "I don't aim to keep on tellin' you, Gault. This is the last time. Go on back to where you came from."

  Somewhere in the back of Gault's mind the quiet voice of reasonableness said, "He's probably right. I'm not doing myself any good, carryin' on this way. It won't bring Martha back. And you can't go on hating a dead man all your life. If he is dead. And the experts claim he is. So it doesn't really make any difference whether or not you talk to Wolf Garnett's sister…"

  But when he looked at the smug arrogance in the deputy's face, he said "Tell your gunhands to get out of my way. I aim to talk to Miss Garnett—unless you're willin' to go as far as to shoot me."

  "I'll go as far as I need to," Dub Finley said, and Gault had no doubt that he meant it.

  Even now the young deputy was quietly taking his measure. Gault could see it in those remote eyes. He was making up his mind whether he ought to kill him here and now, stopping all argument and saving himself a lot of trouble. Gault, in spite of the thing that drove him, was chilled at what he saw in Deputy Finley's eyes.

  Colly Fay was gazing at Gault and grinning vacantly. Shorty Pike sat like a square stump, apparently waiting for some signal from Finley. Gault discovered that his mouth was suddenly dry. His tongue felt thick and furry. No one had bothered to remove his rifle from its saddle boot— they were confident that the weapon was useless and that he was helpless. The only problem of the moment seemed to be whether or not he was worth shooting.

  A fine bead of sweat began to form on Gault's forehead. Somehow he had never expected things to go this far. But then, he reminded himself, a man used to living within the law is always surprised at the prospect of murder. It had surprised him once before.

  He forced himself to sit quietly and tried not to stare at Colly Fay's saddle gun. Dub Finley looked at him with a cool little smile and shrugged his shoulders. The gesture said louder than words, "There's nothing for it, Gault. If I let you go, you'd only come back and cause trouble later. I might as well get it over with now."

  Gault suddenly stared at an invisible point just beyond Colly Fay's shoulder. He stared with all the surprise and fascination that he could muster. Colly blinked, as Gault had hoped he would. The simple-minded rifleman scowled and half-turned in his saddle to see what it was behind him that was so completely fascinating. For an instant the muzzle of the rifle was pulled off line with Gault's chest. Gault struck at it savagely. The weapon fell from Colly's surprised hands, and Gault heard it thud quietly to the soft turf.

  By that time Gault had jerked the startled buckskin around and was spurring toward the covering timber along the river. Even while he was doing it he was thinking, there's no use. Finley's already made up his mind and he will never let me get as far as the river.

  He was right. Almost immediately a second rifle, this one belonging to Shorty Pike, spoke bitingly in the clean morning air. Gault felt the bee sting on his left side. Almost instantly the bee
sting was a rapidly spreading numbness— and, in dizzying sequence, the numbness became a dazzling center of pain.

  He thought angrily to himself: It's nothing. No more than a glancing hit at worse. Maybe a cracked rib. Nothing more than that.

  But already he was falling. There was no more shooting. That was a bad sign, for it meant that Shorty himself must be convinced that he was done for. Gault grabbed for the saddle horn and missed. He continued to fall with nightmarish slowness. He remembered trying, without success, to shake his foot free of the stirrup. Then the ground loomed up and struck him with hammerlike force. The buckskin dragged him for another hundred yards before his foot came free—but Gault did not remember that.

  After what seemed a very long time but could not have been more than a few minutes, Gault became aware of an almost endless expanse of startlingly blue sky. He lay on his back against a stone outcrop that had eventually stopped his rolling and tumbling. There was fire in his side and no air in his lungs. Fighting for breath, he tried to push himself erect. The toe of a dusty boot planted itself in his chest and pushed him back on the damp earth.

  Deputy Dub Finley moved in to stand up against the shimmering backdrop of blue sky. From Gault's position, he looked as tall as a mountain. He had drawn his .45 and was holding it in his right hand, thoughtfully tapping the muzzle in the palm of his left hand while he gazed unblinkingly down at Gault.

  As if from a great distance, Gault heard Shorty Pike say, "Somebody comin'."

  Then the picture became confused. The sky turned dark. The figure of Deputy Finley loomed huge and tilted at a sickening angle. Gault closed his eyes in an effort to keep the sky from spinning. From a void he heard voices and echoes of voices. Some were angry and excited. Others cool and dangerous. Gault didn't open his eyes to see where the voices were coming from. At the moment it didn't seem to matter. In spite of his efforts, the world began to spin. Darkness came down on him like the lid of a coffin.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Here," a voice was saying, "you better take some of this." It was a calm, no-nonsense feminine voice.

  Gault heard the voice but did not respond to it. He let himself float, like an aimless raft on a sluggish river, in a shadow world that was neither sleep nor consciousness. After a while—he didn't know how long—the owner of the voice went away.

  He drifted, without thinking or feeling. At last a shaft of dazzling light struck his eyes and shocked him awake. Squinting, he saw that he was on a bed of loose hay, in a small building that seemed to be a shed of some kind—a feed shed or a small barn. There was a half loft above, and two pole cubicles below which might have been feeding or milking stalls. The light that had shocked him awake was a slant of sunlight coming through the poorly chinked wall.

  Gault rolled over on the mound of hay, to get the sun out of his eyes, and was immediately sorry for his rashness. An arrow of pain pierced his left side and pinned him to the ground. He was still gasping for breath when a shadow fell across the floor of the shed, and the no-nonsense voice asked, "Do you feel like eatin' now?"

  For several seconds Gault could only stare at her. She moved toward him and stood over him, looking down at him. "Best not move around too sharp," she told him unnecessarily. "There ain't much wrong with you, but might a busted rib where the bullet shied off."

  She said it as though someone got shot every day or so around the place, and it was nothing to get excited about. She pulled up a three-legged milking stool and sat down and looked at him steadily. "What's the matter with you? Can't you talk?"

  "I can talk," Gault said with some bitterness. "It's the breathin' that bothers me."

  "That's on account of the bindin' sheet I tied around you. I seen old Doc Doolie do it once to a hand that fell off a horse and busted some ribs."

  "How long have I been here?"

  "Two, three hours, all told. Took some time to haul you over here after Shorty shot you. Fool thing for him to do, and I told him so."

  Gault stared at her. Two surprisingly clear eyes peered at him from beneath the hood of her sunbonnet—that was about all he could see of her face. Besides the sunbonnet, she wore the long, shapeless gray gingham dress that all farm women seemed to favor. In the country west of Kansas City there must have been a thousand farm wives just like her, looking almost as if they had been cut from the same pattern. And yet, there was something about this woman. The bluntness and briskness of youth, Gault guessed it was.

  "I reckon you better lay back and rest a spell," she said, after a few moments' consideration. "Ain't good to get yourself stirred up after bein' shot. That's what my ma always said."

  "Shorty Pike," Gault said, trying to keep his voice even. "And the ones that were with him. Did you see which way they went?"

  Those clear eyes beneath the sunbonnet hood blinked at him. "They didn't go nowhere, they're over at my kitchen eatin' dinner." The woman stood up, nodded briskly and said, "I got some marrow bone broth on the stove. It'll perk you up some."

  "Ma'am," Gault said as she made for the shed door, "just to get somethin' clear in my mind… Are you Wolf Garnett's sister?"

  "Course I am," she said quietly. "Ever'body knows that." Gault closed his eyes and made his mind a blank. The shaft of sunlight moved persistently across his bed of hay and fell once again across his face, but he was too bewildered to notice it, and too tired to move.

  Gault had been awake only a few minutes when he became aware of the tall figure darkening the doorway. Deputy Dub Finley came into the shed, his face scowling and thoughtful, his hairline pointing straight down the slender bridge of his nose. "You're a lucky man, Gault," he said quietly. "You ought to be a gambler. With your luck."

  Gault looked at the deputy's dark countenance and decided that, unpleasant as it was, it was not the face of a man bent on immediate murder. "I guess," he said harshly, "there ain't much sense in askin' if you're goin' to arrest Shorty Pike for shootin' me."

  "Arrest Shorty Pike?" The young lawman was amused. "We seen you clear as day, down in the riverbottom, fixin' to run off two of the Garnett milk cows. We hollered at you, and that's when you started shootin' at us. Shorty fired in self-defense. No two ways about it."

  Gault forced himself to speak without shouting. "What did I use for a gun when I was doin' all this shootin'?"

  "Why your Winchester, of course."

  "Maybe you'd tell me how I could fire a rifle that didn't have a firing pin?"

  The deputy grinned. "There ain't nothin' wrong with that rifle, Gault. I checked it myself. The firin' pin's good as new."

  Gault had no doubt that it was new, but there was no way he could prove it. If he wanted to be stubborn and take the matter to court, it would be his word against Finley's. And he didn't have to guess which side the judge would believe. Still, it was a fact that the deputy had tried to kill him. Would have killed him, if Esther Garnett hadn't happened along when she had.

  "See what I mean, Gault?" The deputy favored Gault with a one-sided smile. "Maybe next time Miss Garnett won't happen along in time to help you. Luck, they say, has a way of runnin' out."

  "Finley," Gault said wearily, "would you tell me somethin'?"

  "Be proud to," the deputy said dryly. "What is it you want to know?"

  "The sheriff, what I saw of him, didn't strike me as a scalp hunter. What does he aim to do with the bounty money when he collects?"

  This was not the question that Finley had expected, but he shrugged and answered without hesitation. "Why, he'll give it over to Miss Esther. What did you figger he'd do with it?"

  Suddenly Gault was tired of the deputy and tired of talking. Finley hunkered down next to the straw bed, studying Gault with curiosity, as a small boy might have studied a horned toad sleeping in the sun. He felt for makings and meticulously built and lit a cigarette. "Like I say," he said mildly. "You been runnin' in luck. But a smart gambler knows when the cards're startin' to turn on him. What kind of a gambler are you, Gault?"

  "A curious one."
<
br />   Finley shook his head sadly. "The worst kind." He finished his smoke and shoved himself to his feet.

  "I take it," Gault said acidly, "that you and the sheriff, and some others, don't want me in Standard County any longer. Might be I'd leave, and save you the trouble of killin' me, if I knowed why it was that you didn't want me here."

  Finley smiled. It was a chilling expression on a humorless face. "Miss Esther ain't had much schoolin', but she's a tolerable good doc. She'll have you up and around inside of two, three days. Your buckskin's in the horse pen on the other side of the shed. My advice is get saddled soon as you're able to ride, and strike for some direction away from Standard County."

  The deputy nodded and strode out of the shed. Gault lay for a long while, his mind milling in aimless circles. He saw Shorty Pike and Colly Fay pass in front of the open doorway, heading for the Garnett cornfield with long-handled hoes on their shoulders.

  Gunhands hoeing corn. It made a bizarre picture. And it raised bizarre and disturbing thoughts in his mind.

  He drifted into a troubled sleep, and when he awoke Esther Garnett was standing over him with a large crock bowl in her hands. "Deputy Finley said you was in a hurry to get well so's you could start back to your homeplace. You won't be doin' much ridin' for three, four days. And not then, if you don't start eatin'." She pulled up the milking stool and sat down and handed him the bowl.

  "Sorry to put you out," he said with lingering bitterness. "I didn't aim to go and get myself shot on your property."

  She ignored his heavy sarcasm. "Wasn't your fault," she told him. "All a misunderstandin'. Deputy Finley and Shorty and Colly thought you was drivin' off my cows."

  There didn't seem to be any point in arguing about it. Gault gazed down at the soup, a rich brown broth swimming with grease and chunks of marrow. The thought of eating any of it caused his stomach to curl. What he wanted was a large glass of whiskey and some rest. More than anything else, a night of dreamless sleep. A night of oblivion in which Martha's terrified eyes did not haunt him.