by Evans, Tabor
“They went out hunting, Custis. My father and his men.” She spoke slowly, as though to a thick child. “They made a bet with a couple of the local men. A thousand-dollar bet that they couldn’t kill a wolf and bring it back to the Carpathian.”
“What the hell are you sayin’, Catherine? Why the hell couldn’t they kill a wolf?”
“The local men say that during a full moon, the only thing that will kill the wolves is silver bullets. Father and his men have foolishingly, drunkenly taken them up on the challenge, and they’ve headed out to hunt the wolves with regular bullets and bring at least one back to the saloon, though Father boasted that they’d each get one!”
“Well, that’s just plain reckless,” Longarm said, clearer now, rising and looking for his clothes. “Who knows how many wolves are out there? And, hell, who knows if the locals are right or not?”
Catherine remained sitting on the edge of the bed, staring up at him incredulously. “What are you saying? You think they’re really werewolves?”
“I’m sayin’ that if I head out there after wolves tonight, I’d copper my bets and at least use silver bullets.” Longarm snorted and shook his head as he shoved one foot into his balbriggan bottoms. “Can’t believe I just said that, but there it is. Shit, I’m as crazy as Calvin.”
“Will you help me find those idiots and bring them back? I didn’t know what they’d done until I went down to the saloon just a few minutes ago, and the local men told me. Despite the moon, it’s damn scary out there. I didn’t want to go out there alone.” Catherine shuddered, hugged herself. “That one wolf keeps howling and howling.”
Longarm paused, listening. Sure enough, the wolf was still howling. He wondered if it had been howling steadily since the last time he’d noticed it.
“No, you’d best not go out there alone. In fact, you’d best not go out there at all.” Longarm reached for his gun rig, strapped it around his waist. “I’ll go find’em and bring ’em back before they’re wolf bait.” If it isn’t too late, the fools, he added to himself.
“I’m going with you!” she insisted as he grabbed his Winchester and headed out of her room, Catherine on his heels.
The full-moon celebration had died down only slightly in the main drinking hall. The place was so smoky that it was like wading through a field after a pitched battle involving a thousand cannons. A couple of the local men, in beards, suspenders, billed watch caps, and with faces wizened from years of the high-country weather, danced together while the others conversed and drank. The whores were still making the rounds, though they looked tired and drawn. One was leading a stocky gent up the stairs as Longarm and Catherine made their ways along the bar to the front door.
Longarm could tell who’d challenged the general and the general’s friends to the wolf hunt by the self-satisfied, faintly jeering expressions on a local man’s face. Likely one of the original settlers, he had a long, hawk-nosed face with a dark mole on his cheek and slick black hair.
Longarm had seen him before, and because of the man’s proud businessman’s air, the lawman had assumed that he owned at least a couple of successful enterprises here in Crazy Kate. He was sitting with three others at a table near the ticking potbelly stove. He and his assocaties, all clad in suits and fur hats, were smoking pipes and sitting back in their chairs, waiting to see if any of the arrogant strangers survived the wolf hunt. The bowl of the pipe the challenger was smoking was a carving of a wolf’s head.
Outside, the wolf from the north mountain gave its haunting cry as Catherine closed the saloon door behind her and Longarm. Their breath puffed in the chill air. The moon had reached its zenith and was beginning its long, slow fall to the west. It was nearly as light as day out here, though the shadows around buildings and objects were heavy, inky, and menacing with all that they might conceal.
The moonlight made the street look like a river angling between silhouetted ridges. On it, nothing moved. With his eyes Longarm probed the shadows beneath stoops and in alley mouths, and saw no sign of the wolves. He looked at the jailhouse. The lamp in its window had finally gone out.
“Any idea which way they headed?” Longarm asked Catherine.
“No. I came out and called for them a few minutes ago, but I got no reply. They must be a ways away.”
Longarm dropped down off the porch steps, squeezing the Winchester in his gloved hands. Part of him wished he had silver bullets for the long gun; another part of him scoffed at the notion.
“You stay close,” he said, as he moved out into the street, probing every shadow with his eyes, pricking his ears, trying to get some sense of which direction the general and his moneyed friends had headed.
Between the long, echoing calls of the wolf on the north mountain, a sound came from the northwest. Hard to tell what it was. An echoing snarl? What sounded like a man’s yell followed.
Catherine gasped.
“That must be them. Damn Father, the drunken idiot!”
“He do this sort of thing often?” Longarm asked, keeping his voice low as he began walking west along the street.
“You mean does he get drunk with his friends and accept crazy challenges? Yes.” Catherine was speaking just above a whisper, clinging to Longarm’s elbow. “Never anything this crazy, though. I’d thought his trying to lasso a grizzly a couple of months ago was as bad as it would ever get.”
“He must be damn bored.”
“I regret that I ever encouraged him to retire,” Catherine said.
Longarm continued walking along the street. The sounds—whatever they were, a commotion of some kind—continued to rise from what seemed to be the northwest.
Longarm headed that way, swerving to the right of the main street, traversing a break between buildings, and then curving westward among cabins, stock pens, and privies. Most of the cabins he passed were dark. Longarm assumed that everyone who lived out here was either in the Carpathian Saloon or in Zeena’s Black Wolf House of a Thousand Delights, or one of the other smaller watering holes now providing sanctuary from the wild beasts preying on the town.
That was where Longarm should be. Catherine, too. If her old man wanted to kill himself, let him have it. No better way to do it than to be out here hunting wolves in the dark, even if the moon was full. Or, maybe, especially if the moon was full . . .
“What an awful smell,” Catherine said when they’d stolen slowly along the edge of the town, between Crazy Kate and the northern ridge, for about fifteen minutes.
Longarm had smelled it, too. On his right a large barn loomed. On his left was a cabin with a caved-in roof. They’d strayed onto an old farmstead, maybe home to one of the original settlers. The town had spread out just south of it. There was no sign that anyone still lived here. The thick, sickly sweet fetor of putrefying flesh wafted from the direction of the barn.
Suspicion raked at Longarm as he stared at the barn, frowning.
“Come on,” he told Catherine. “I’m gonna check it out.”
As he walked toward the big building hulking before him, she followed, both of them stepping lightly, he with his rifle up and ready, she extending her revolver. They pivoted on their hips and turned their heads back and forth slowly, looking around. The sounds they’d been following had died.
The fetor grew stronger with each step Longarm took toward the barn. The structure’s large front doors were gone, the opening forming a black rectangle against the moon-silvered front wall. The light penetrated only a few feet, laying down a silver prism. By the time he reached the barn’s opening, his eyes were watering from the stench of decay. Catherine held her arm over her nose and mouth.
Longarm peered inside but couldn’t see anything; in contrast to the moonlight, the barn’s bowels were nearly as dark as the bottom of a well. Not hearing anything moving around inside, or seeing any yellow eyes glowing at him, he lit a lucifer and held it up as he walked into the dark
ness beyond the door.
The flickering match light revealed a lamp hanging from a stout post on his right. He lit the lamp and held it high, walking around, wincing against the horrible, nearly overpowering smell, breathing through his mouth to keep from retching.
The sphere of flickering lamplight revealed several ropes dangling from high rafters. Some of these ropes held what were obviously the remains of deer or elk, judging by the sizes of the remaining bones and the heads that were still suspended in loops a good eight or ten feet above the barn floor.
Very little meat, hide, or fur remained on the bones. In fact, some of the ropes held nothing at all, but that they had once suspended dead animals above the floor was obvious by the dried red blood that clung to the hemp.
Lowering the lamp and continuing to move around the barn, Longarm saw that the floor was thickly carpeted in more dried blood that crunched when he walked on it. The floor was strewn with white bones of all shapes and sizes; they’d been stripped clean, scoured by feral teeth that had first ripped chunks of the bodies down from the ropes.
Despite the grisliness of the discovery and the rancid smell that caused tears to ooze out of his eyes and dribble down his cheeks, Longarm chuckled. He lifted the lamp’s cowl, blew out the flame, and hung the lamp on its post.
As he walked outside, Catherine stared at him over the arm she still held over her mouth. In the moonlight glistening in her hair spilling over her shoulders, he could see that she was frowning curiously at him.
“Think I just found out what makes the wolves love Crazy Kate so much.”
“You don’t think someone’s been feeding them, do you?”
“Not only someone but who.”
Catherine opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it suddenly. Several rifles barked in the west. Wolves snarled and yipped. Men shouted.
“Oh, no!” Catherine said, her voice quaking.
She and Longarm broke into a run across the farmyard.
Chapter 17
Longarm carried his rifle in one hand as he ran, pumping his arms and legs. He didn’t worry about tripping. The moonlight was nearly as bright as sunlight, delineating all the rocks and shrubs and piles of discarded lumber in his path.
Ahead, the desperate shooting continued. While the men’s shouts and cries dwindled, the yipping and snarling of enraged wolves grew louder. It all was emanating from down a long hill strewn with boulders and spiked with cedars and junipers. On Longarm’s right, the black ridge wall jutted against the stars whose light was barely visible amid the incredible, buttery light of the high-kiting moon.
He could hear Catherine running behind him though he was gradually outdistancing her. Ahead, he could see the flashes of the guns, the flames stabbing toward his left, where wolf-shaped shadows flicked this way and that.
Longarm stopped suddenly. Something moved downslope about twenty yards away. Two yellow eyes glowed. A man lay beside the wolf, writhing in pain. The wolf was shaking something in its teeth. An arm. Longarm could see two rings on the pale hand winking in the moonlight as the wolf shook the arm as though it were a rabbit.
Longarm raised the Winchester, planted a bead on the wolf’s shoulder, nudged it up and back, and squeezed the trigger. The Winchester screeched loudly, flames stabbing from the barrel. The wolf lurched back and up, yipping before dropping the arm and piling up at its victim’s quivering feet.
Longarm snapped a curse. Footsteps and heavy breathing grew louder behind him. He turned to see Catherine approaching. She’d lost her hat, and her hair blew in the wind, her eyes wide with alarm.
“Stay here,” he told her, and then ran forward to drop beside the wolf. He placed a hand in the thick, knotted fur. The beast was still warm, but there was no heartbeat.
He went over to the wolf’s victim. Catherine ran up beside him and crouched down over the bloody body.
“Sidney!” she gasped.
Ashton-Green, clothed in a fur coat but missing his hat, a thick scarf around his neck, moved his lips as he tried to speak, but then he gave a long sigh. He sagged back against the ground and lay still.
Catherine sobbed. The shooting and yelling and wolf snarling continued farther down the slope. Longarm leaped over Sidney and continued running toward where, while the guns roared, the shadows jostled around what appeared to be a pile of rocks.
A man screamed. A wolf howled victoriously and snarled especially loudly.
Another man shouted, and then there was only one rifle barking, stabbing flames at the silhouetted wolves surrounding the man.
So he wouldn’t get hit by one of the bullets that the shooter seemed to be flinging every which way in his desperate attempt to keep himself out of the jaws of his attackers, Longarm dropped to one knee behind a boulder. Quickly, he slapped his Winchester butt plate to his shoulder and began picking out shadows and firing.
The echoes of the thundering reports hammered off the side of the ridge. Wolves yipped and squealed. The surviviors of Longarm’s fussilade, confused and disoriented by the unexpected attack, retreated off down the slope.
Silence.
Longarm quickly thumbed fresh cartridges through the rifle’s loading gate as he stared through the powder smoke that wafted like fog around his head, toward the nest of rocks ahead of him.
As he worked, he shouted, “Who’s over there?”
The responding voice was weak, breathless. “Gen . . . General Fortescue. Is that you, Marshal Long?”
“Father!” Catherine yelled.
“Catherine! Good Christ—what are you doing out here?”
Longarm waved the girl to silence. “You torn up, General?”
“No. I was bit, but not bad.”
“Then run this way while I cover you.”
Catherine started to run to the general, but Longarm grabbed her arm and pulled her back behind the rocks. “Stay here. He’ll make it.”
“Father, hurry!” Catherine cried.
Longarm racked a fresh cartridge into the Winchester’s breech then aimed in the general’s direction, sliding the barrel left to right and back again, watching for wolves. The general’s stocky, slightly stooped figure rose up out of the rocks where he’d sought refuge from the kill-crazy beasts, and began jogging up the grade toward Longarm and Catherine.
“Hurry, Father!” the girl called.
Aside from the howls of the wolf coming from the direction of the convent, which Longarm had become so accustomed to that he now only vaguely heard them, the night was silent. Nothing moved around the general. The man lumbered up the hill. When he was twenty feet from Longarm, the lawman walked out to grab the man’s arm. Catherine ran to him then, too, and took the breathless, wheezing man’s other arm.
“How bad are you hurt?” Catherine asked.
The man shook his head. “Just my leg. My hand. I’ll be all right. We followed them down here from town, and they jumped us. Just like Indians, they surrounded and swarmed all over us.”
“You think any of your boys are still alive down there?” Longarm asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“No,” the general wheezed. “They were jumped immediately. I started firing and so did Sidney. That’s how we got away. Sidney said he was going to try to get to town for help.” He looked questioningly from Catherine to Longarm.
“He didn’t make it, Father,” Catherine said, grimly. “It’s okay. You’re all right. We’ll get you back to town. What a stupid thing to do in the first place!”
“Yes, yes, well—I’ve no defense except that I just didn’t realize how many there are. How brave they are. I’ve never seen wolves like this.”
As Longarm and Catherine continued guiding and steering the man up the hill, swinging wide around Sidney Ashton-Green’s dark, bloody form, Longarm said, “I never have either. And for good reason. These wolves are being fed. Probably regularly and probably ju
st enough to keep them wanting more. That’s why there’s so many of them, why they’re so big and, likely, why they’ve become so brave!”
“Fed?” The General stopped suddenly and looked in shock at the tall lawman. “Why? Who?”
They’d just reached the top of the hill and were heading back in the direction of the farmyard when something flashed in the moonlight and inky shadows ahead. Longarm knew it was a gun before he heard the bullet screech about six inches off his left ear and spang off a rock behind him. A half second later, the rifle’s thundering report vaulted around the canyon.
“Down!” he shouted, throwing the general behind a large boulder to his left and then quickly throwing Catherine down after her father. There were two more flashes in a low escarpment just ahead about thirty yards and to his right—a flash on each side of the scarp that appeared as a dark mound trimmed in silvery moonlight, bristling with moon-silvered and -shadowed junipers.
Longarm snapped his rifle to his shoulder and triggered one round where he’d seen each flash, then threw himself sideways behind the boulder. The bushwhackers cut down on him again, their slugs blowing up dust and gravel inches from his heels. He drew his legs behind the cover and pressed his back against the boulder.
Catherine put her hand on his shoulder. “Are you hit, Custis?”
“No. Not that they ain’t tryin’!”
“Who’s they?” asked the general, sitting on the other side of Catherine, with his back against the boulder, holding his bit hand in his lap gingerly. His gray hair and carefully trimmed mustache shone in the moonlight.
Longlarm pumped another shell into his Winchester’s breech, gritting his teeth in fury. “Calvin and his big deputy.” He doffed his hat and slid a cautious glance out around the boulder.
A gun on the low scarp’s right side flashed. The bullet curled the air off Longarm’s right cheek before plunking into the ground with a high, echoing whine behind him.
