Ralph Compton The Man From Nowhere

by West, Joseph A. ; Compton, Ralph

  “Dear me, Eddie,” he said. “I guess God wasn’t listening to my hymn singing. He didn’t help me much.”

  “Pickles, even God can’t help you if you try to run a bluff when your poke’s empty.”

  “Who taught you to shoot like that, Eddie? If I’d known you were so good with a gun I’d have handled this scrape differently.”

  “An old man by the name of Jacob Yearly taught me. He was worth a thousand o’ you.”

  “And what happened to this paragon?”

  “Your boss, Darlene McWilliams, ordered him killed.”

  Pickles groaned deep in his throat. “I’m dying, Eddie. Damn it, man, I can’t quite believe that a little runt like you has done for me.”

  “Good riddance,” Oates said, no pity in him.

  “I always thought it might come to this, Eddie, me dying like a dog in the middle of nowhere.” He turned his head. “Over there, beside my rifle at the base of the tree, in my coat pocket there’s a letter to my dear wife. I’ve kept it on my person for many years, telling how much I love her and not to grieve for me when I’m gone.”

  He raised his head, his fading green eyes on Oates’ stone face. “The address is on the envelope. It’s—it’s in Denver. See that she gets it. . . .”

  Then life fled Peter Jasper Pickles and only his empty carcass was left.

  Oates looked down at the man for a while, then stepped to the tree. He found the letter, returned to the fire and threw it into the flames where he watched it curl, turn black and burn to ashes.

  He had not opened the letter, nor did he look inside the rifle case. To Oates, the case and the weapon that lay inside were things of evil. He tossed the case into the creek where the rifle would rust at nature’s pace.

  That done, he kneeled by the fire and poured himself tea. He ate the bacon, deer liver and wild onions Pickles had cooked and found it good.

  Chapter 34

  “I left him where he lay,” Oates said. “By this time he’s probably poisoned all the coyotes for miles around.”

  “Lucky Pickles didn’t see you coming, Eddie,” Rivette said. “He’d have laid for you.”

  Oates shrugged. “Well, I gave him an even break. He shot too fast.”

  “You never know how a man will stack up until he’s faced with it,” Rivette said. “Seems to me Pickles should have put in more practice with the Colt’s gun.”

  Oates turned and smiled at Nantan. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “No thanks to you,” Lorraine snapped. “Tying up the poor thing’s arm with rope!”

  “It’s all I had,” Oates said mildly. Nantan now had a proper sling, made out of what looked like an old sheet. “You did a good job, Lorraine,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me; thank Stella. She’s the one played doctor.”

  “When you’ve been around punchers as long as I have, you get to bind up a heap of broken collarbones,” Stella said. She looked at Oates. “She’ll heal up nicely, but she’ll always have a scar.”

  “No more bare shoulders for me come fiesta time.” Nantan smiled.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, just brush your hair over it,” Nellie sniffed. “No one will notice. If it’s men you’re thinking about, they won’t be looking at you that close anyway.”

  “You’re such a bitch, Nellie,” Lorraine said.

  “It takes one to know one, Lorraine.”

  They were sitting in the dining room of the Bon View Hotel, a single lamp burning the last of the precious oil they’d found. On an adjoining table lay a few cans, a small package of coffee, another of salt and a box of iron-hard army biscuit, all the food they’d been able to find in their search of the town.

  However Lorraine had unearthed a worn, cotton dress that fit her poorly, but she had at last ditched her ragged nightgown and mackinaw.

  Stella rose and returned carrying a large tin box that she set on the table.

  “Eddie, can you leave tomorrow for Silver City?” she asked. “We badly need supplies.”

  Oates nodded. “Sure, but I don’t like to leave Nantan alone.”

  “I won’t be alone,” the girl said, speaking through a yawn because the hour was late. “I’m going with you.”

  “But—”

  “No but, Eddie,” Nantan said firmly, “I’m going.”

  Rivette laughed. “Eddie, never argue with a woman when she’s tired. Never argue with her when she’s rested either.”

  Stella said impatiently, “Eddie, that’s something you and Nantan can work out for yourselves. Right now, I want to talk about what we need. And be careful in Silver City. They’ll take you for a rube and try to charge you three prices for everything. That’s why I’ve made you this list and the price you should pay.”

  She opened the box and handed Oates a scrap of paper. “Read that,” she said.

  Oates scanned the list of items.

  Salt pork 11 cents/pound

  Bacon 15 cents/pound

  Salt beef 9 cents/pound

  Fresh beef 5 cents/pound

  Flour (extra fine) 5 cents/pound

  Hardbread 10 cents/pound

  Beans 10 cents/quart

  Rice 8 cents/pound

  Coffee 12 cents (Rio) or (Java) 15 cents/pound

  Sugar 8 cents for Louisiana brown/pound

  Vinegar 6 cents/quart

  “Looks like you’ve got it covered, Stella,” Oates said. “I won’t let them cheat me.”

  “There are a few more things I didn’t write down,” the woman said. “Butter, cheese, eggs, apples, soda crackers—whatever looks good and is reasonably priced. Oh, and bring me a few sacks of tobacco and smoking papers.” She looked at Rivette. “Cigars?”

  The gambler nodded. “Cubans, if you can find them. If not, whatever is available.”

  Stella opened the box again, coins clinking as she searched through it, and finally produced a gold double eagle. “This is for the supplies and your expenses, Eddie. Use my mare for the packhorse. She’ll stand.”

  “We need ammunition,” Rivette said. “A few boxes each of .44-40s for the rifles and .45s for the revolvers.”

  “Warren,” Lorraine said, “Eddie’s just got through telling you that Pete Pickles is dead.”

  “Yes, he did at that. But Darlene McWilliams is still alive.”

  “What does that mean?” Stella asked.

  “I don’t know what it means, maybe nothing, maybe a lot,” Rivette said. “I just don’t believe we’ve seen the last of her.”

  “She’s about to marry the Circle-T,” Oates said. “Tom Carson has more money than God, and what’s his is now Darlene’s. I don’t reckon she’ll ride all the way out here for five thousand dollars. I figure Carson carries that amount in his billfold when he goes into town on Friday night.”

  “We should be on our guard anyhow,” Rivette said. He glanced around the table. Stella and Nellie looked a little frightened. Sam Tatum and Lorraine were merely interested and Oates seemed on edge. He couldn’t get a read on Nantan, who was part of all this, but detached from it at the same time.

  “Back in the Louisiana bayous where I was raised, I remember my grandmother and all the other old, black-eyed swamp witches always knowing what was going to happen weeks or months before it did,” Rivette said. “Births, deaths, marriages . . . they knew.

  “My mother was the same way. She had the gift. Some call it second sight, and I think maybe she passed it on to me.”

  “What do you see?” Lorraine asked eagerly.

  Rivette smiled and shook his head. “I don’t see, Lorraine. I feel. And the feeling I have is that Darlene McWilliams shares the same weakness as Pete Pickles. She’s an overly arrogant and ambitious young woman in a hurry, and she’ll make a mistake, overstep her mark.

  “After that happens, she’ll want her five thousand in a hurry and she’ll come after us.”

  “When?” Stella asked.

  “I don’t know. But it might well be sooner rather than later.”

&
nbsp; Oates had been silent, lost in thought, and now he said, “ ‘Something wicked this way comes . . .’ ”

  Rivette looked at him, surprised. “Macbeth, right?”

  “Yes. The witches of Macbeth.”

  Looking around the table, as the wind howled around the eaves of the building and the lamp flame guttered, the gambler said, “I can’t put it any better than Shakespeare. . . . ‘Something wicked this way comes.’ We can expect it soon. And we should be ready.”

  “Do you think Rivette is right, Eddie? Will that McWilliams woman come here?”

  Nantan was whispering in the darkness, her mouth close to Oates’ neck.

  “Yeah, I think she will. Warren Rivette doesn’t air out his lungs often, but when he does, what he says is worth listening to.”

  They had chosen a bedroom on the first floor of the hotel and Oates had spread his blanket roll on the rough timber planking. Moonlight, as thin as mist, filtered through the naked windows and cast elongated crosses that rose from the floor and stretched up the far wall.

  “Eddie, is she a danger to us, this woman, to you and me?”

  “She’s a danger to Stella, so she is an enemy of all of us.”

  Nantan nodded, her soft lips brushing Oates’ skin. “That is how it should be. It is the Apache way.”

  The girl was quiet for so long, Oates thought she was asleep, but she whispered, “Eddie, we are not truly man and wife until our bodies have joined. Do you believe that? Nellie told me it is so.”

  “Nellie doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose. But when your shoulder heals, we will join. You’re the last person in the world I’d want to hurt, Nantan.”

  Another long stretch of quiet; then she said, “Sleep well, my husband.”

  “You too, Mrs. Oates. You too.”

  Chapter 35

  Three months passed and during that time Oates and Nantan made four trips to Silver City. On his last visit he arranged for a brewer’s dray to deliver whiskey, beer and a French glass mirror to Rivette’s saloon. Oates and Sam Tatum had helped the gambler renovate the Sideboard, now renamed the Riverboat. And Rivette placed an optimistic painted sign outside the premises that promised patrons FINEST CIGARS, CORDIALS AND LIQUORS.

  Stella took over the best gingerbread house in town, and she, Lorraine and Nellie imported furniture, carpets and bedding from Silver City. It took the better part of two months, but when the Golden Garter opened for business, all agreed that the place must rival the best cathouses in Denver or Dodge City.

  Miners and even a few cowboys began to drift into Heartbreak and by their fourth month, Stella and Rivette saw their business pick up. The attractions also attracted the rougher, outlaw element, and several times Oates and the gambler were forced to run them out of town.

  But, with paying customers at a premium, the high-rolling hard cases were usually told they could come back when they were prepared to act like gentlemen, and most did.

  The lack of a proper eating house was a problem, but that was solved by the arrival of Hermann the German, his fat wife and two even fatter daughters.

  By Oates’ estimate, Hermann Schmidt would skin out at around three hundred fifty pounds and his wife and daughters a few ounces less.

  Schmidt said he was headed north to Socorro, where the Buffalo Soldiers stationed at Fort Craig would be a regular source of customers for his steaks, sausages and pies. He winked at Rivette and told him that he might also be able to find husbands among the officers for his daughters.

  But when Schmidt saw that the restaurant in town had been abandoned more or less intact, he parked his wagon and declared that he was willing to make a trial of it.

  The big German wanted to name his place the Aschaffenburg, but wiser heads prevailed and he agreed to change it to the more manageable Hermann’s Kitchen.

  A steady stream of supply wagons now regularly blocked Heartbreak’s only street and the stagecoach drivers regularly stopped to allow passengers to sample tastier fare than Bill Daley’s fried elk and beans.

  Fall came and went and Heartbreak prospered.

  Stella hired three new girls, a man named Fallon took over the hotel and a second saloon opened. There was now a general store and talk of a ladies’ dress and hat shop arriving soon.

  Sam Tatum found a new career, painting portraits of miners to send home to loved ones, for which they paid handsomely. Using Nellie as a model, Tatum also did naked lady pictures for Rivette’s saloon and the Golden Garter and was well on his way to becoming a well-to-do artist.

  Oates and Nantan found a house on the outskirts of town and he made a living doing odd jobs around town and managed to stay away from the bottle.

  In November, as winter cracked down hard across the high country, Nantan announced that she was pregnant. Stella and Lorraine were delighted and declared themselves aunts to the unborn they confidently predicted would be a girl. Nellie was unimpressed and told anyone who would listen that Nantan’s whole pregnancy thing was probably a false alarm.

  After the first snow, many miners decided to winter in town and all twenty rooms in the Bon View were rented. It seemed that everyone was doing a booming business and Stella and Rivette, who were now constantly in each other’s company, were getting rich.

  For his part, Oates felt out of place in a town he’d helped resurrect from the dead. His odd jobs did not earn him a lot of money and were getting fewer as winter arrived. Nantan needed a comfortable home to raise her child and a husband who could support her.

  Oates owned his horse, saddle, guns and the dead man’s clothes he stood up in. There was not much there to build a future around, especially one that involved a wife and child.

  As others prospered, Oates grew poorer, and he recognized a danger within himself. Self-pity seduces a man and soon he acts like a victim, a destructive emotion that Oates knew could take him by the ear and lead him to the whiskey bottle.

  But one cold afternoon in early December, the attempted holdup of a Wells Fargo stage would be the first link in a chain of events that would change Eddie Oates’ life forever.

  He was walking back to his house with a few things Nantan needed from the general store when the stage clattered to a stop outside the hotel. A bloody, wounded driver was up on the box, a dead passenger inside and grim old Ethan Savage, the shotgun guard, blistering the air with curses.

  Oates looked up at the guard. “What happened, Ethan?” he asked.

  “We was attacked just this side o’ Animas Peak, that’s what happened. Ol’ Charlie Grant here took a bullet in the arm an’ we lost a passenger when them eedjits started shooting at us as we lit out of there.”

  A crowd had gathered and Grant was helped down from the box. The dead passenger, an elderly man in black broadcloth, was carried into the hotel.

  “Recognize any of them, Ethan?” Oates asked.

  “Oh yeah. Mash Halleck was one o’ them fer sure.” Savage spit a stream of tobacco juice over the side of the stage, then rubbed the back of his gloved hand across his mouth. “He was wearing a bandanna over the bottom of his face, but there’s no mistaking them eyes o’ his, cold like an ornery snake. I seen ol’ Mash up close too many times not to recognize him.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Four—Mash and three others.”

  Suddenly Warren Rivette was at Oates’ elbow. “Can you tell us anything about the others, Ethan?”

  “Well, if’n I was a bettin’ man like you, Rivette, I’d wager one o’ them was Mash’s son Clem. All I can tell you about t’other robbers was that one seemed young and well set up, riding a mighty pretty Palouse hoss, and the fourth man looked like a puncher.” The old man smiled. “I got a load of buckshot into him.”

  Oates turned to Rivette. “Charlie McWilliams rides a Palouse horse.”

  Rivette nodded. “Could be him all right.” To Savage he said, “What are you carrying that would make you a target for an outlaw like Halleck?”

  “No strongbox this trip. The only mon
ey on this stage is what the passengers are carrying. I figure Mash was only huntin’ a road stake, sure enough.”

  “You better see to the driver and your passengers, Ethan,” Rivette said.

  “Any law around here yet?” Savage asked.

  To Oates’ surprise, Rivette answered, “You’re looking at it.”

  “The puncher shouldn’t be hard to find,” Savage said. “A man doesn’t ride far with two barrels o’ lead shot in his belly.”

  After the guard had gone into the hotel, Oates looked at Rivette and smiled. “So we’re the law in Heartbreak, huh?”

  “Seems like. We don’t want a posse of miners riding burros, no, and everybody else is either too old or too fat.” Rivette grinned. “Can you visualize Hermann the German on a horse?”

  “No, I guess I can’t,” Oates said. He held up his packages. “I’ll take these home and meet you back here in ten minutes.” He looked at Rivette closely. “If it was Charlie McWilliams riding the Palouse, then something has happened at the Circle-T.”

  Rivette nodded. “Yes, something bad for Darlene. I’m willing to bet the farm that she’s on the run again and looking for a stake.”

  “But she has a war chest of twenty-five thousand dollars. Why would she need a road stake?”

  “Tom Carson liked his poker and whiskey, but he was careful with a dollar. I guess he insisted Darlene put her money in a safe place, like Cornelius Baxter’s bank in Alma. With a Circle-T hanging posse on her trail, Darlene wouldn’t have time to make a withdrawal, and she’d know that Baxter would have questioned her and maybe smelled a rat or three.”

  “You reckon she might come here?”

  “Why not? Heartbreak is where her money is and we haven’t exactly made a secret about being here. Pete Pickles failed her, but Darlene has three fast guns backing her that won’t, or so she thinks.”

  “Then we should stay right here in town.”

  Rivette shook his head. “I know we’re not going to find Darlene, not with Mash Halleck riding scout for her. But if the cowboy old Ethan shot is still alive, I’d like to talk with him. Maybe we can get enough out of the man to keep Darlene in custody until we can get a United States marshal here.”