Hour of Death

by William W. Johnstone

  The bars were sunk deep in stone casement, top and bottom. He quivered with effort, the bars unmoving. Powdery stone dust sifted down from the top where the bars were implanted.

  Sixkiller eased up, abandoning the effort. If necessary, he might be able to work the bars loose and climb out the window.

  He looked out at Ringgold. The sun was low in the west, hidden behind a row of buildings. Beyond, lay a distant mountain range. Purple shadows were spreading east. The evening star twinkled.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress was alive with insect pests, giving him something to watch to make the time pass.

  Sixkiller was stoic with the patience of a hunter and an Indian. He’d kept long vigils in uncomfortable places to nab human or animal prey. He was good at waiting. He neither liked it nor despised it. Worrying at it didn’t make the time go any faster so he made sure he had no feelings at all about it.

  Bull, less patient, was the first to break the ice. “That was a pretty good fight, huh?”

  Sixkiller grunted acknowledgment. “Not so bad at that.”

  “Maybe later we can pick up where we left off. See who’s the better man.”

  “First, I want to see how much this one’ll cost me.”

  “They’re a bunch of soreheads,” Bull said. “I didn’t think Rourke would take it so hard. I thought he was bigger than that.”

  “Maybe he’ll cool off after he’s had time to think about it.”

  “Sure.” After a pause, Bull said, “You think so?”

  Sixkiller barked a single mirthless laugh. “I don’t know. It’s your town. You tell me.”

  “He’s a sporting man, a gambler,” Bull said, sounding unsure, as if trying to convince himself. “Hell, he likes a good fight.”

  “Maybe not in his place quite so much,” Sixkiller pointed out.

  “I’ll tell you this. He didn’t sic the law on us. That ain’t Rourke’s style. He takes care of his own problems. Braddock probably came a-running to horn in and impress the town council with what a good job he’s doing.”

  “Could be.”

  There was a silence, then Bull chuckled. “Braddock didn’t want to mix it up with us.”

  “Those shotguns were mighty convincing,” Sixkiller said.

  “Easier to pull a shotgun on two unarmed men than go chasing some outlaws who’ll shoot back at him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ain’t like horse stealing or robbing a stagecoach. Just a good clean fight, that’s all.”

  “Reckon the judge’ll see it like that?” Sixkiller asked.

  “We don’t go before a judge. We’ll get tried by Justice of the Peace Applewhite,” Bull said, returning to reality. “There’s a circuit judge comes to town ’bout every six weeks or so, but they use him for serious business—killings, holdups, and such. Justice of the peace handles the small stuff.”

  “What’s he like?” Sixkiller asked.

  “Applewhite? Prissy, whey-faced son of a gun. He’s for the businessmen and the big ranchers, not the cowboy.”

  “That doesn’t look so good for us.”

  “Oh, he’s a fair man. He only fines you for every cent you got. We probably won’t get no jail time. The town don’t want to pay for our room and board and we ain’t done nothing bad enough to get sent to the territorial prison.”

  “I need my money to kit up for prospecting. I had to leave my gear in Bitter Creek when I was running from some Arapahos. I need provisions—pans for panning gold, a pick and shovel, an ax, hammer and nails for making sluice boxes—and a pack horse to carry it all,” Sixkiller said. “Applewhite will empty your pockets of everything, but the lint in them,” Bull said sourly. Then, confiding low-voiced, he went on. “You look like a wide-awake fellow, Quinto. A man can always get along on the Glint if he knows how to use a running iron and ain’t too particular about whose strays he rounds up. I know plenty buyers who ain’t too particular about where they get their beef from. Throw in with me and you can do all right for yourself. Build up a stake pretty quick.”

  “I’m a prospector not a cow puncher, but I’ll keep it in mind, thanks. I’ll tell you this. I’m not leaving the valley broke and with my tail tucked between my legs just because we had a little dustup.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Bull enthused.

  “Much lawbreaking in Ringgold?” Sixkiller asked, taking a new tack.

  “Are you kidding? The whole blamed valley’s busting loose. A killing a day and more.”

  “I don’t mind throwing a wide loop or working a running iron, but I ain’t much for killing unless somebody’s got it coming.”

  “I feel the same way,” Bull said righteously.

  “Ever think of taking up prospecting, Bull?”

  “I ain’t much for digging in the dirt, Quinto.”

  “Big money in it if you hit pay dirt,” Sixkiller pointed out.

  “If,” Bull repeated. “You got to find the gold first, and that’s a full-time job. You don’t have to look too hard for cattle. They’re all over the Glint, just begging to be rounded up, branded, and sold.”

  “Other people’s cattle.”

  “Not after you steal them.”

  “You’ve got something there,” Sixkiller allowed.

  “Besides, there ain’t no gold up in the hills,” Bull said, pressing his advantage. “Braddock had the straight of that.”

  “What about that party of gold seekers that disappeared this summer? The Englishman? Sounds like he was on to something.”

  “Aw, that was just a wild goose chase. He was a loco foreigner cracked in the head.”

  “Crazy like a fox. A rich man like that don’t just pack up and quit his castle and all the creature comforts of home to cross the sea and the Mississippi and the Rockies to come scratch dirt in Wyoming Territory on a hunch. He must’ve had some damned good information.”

  “Pshaw! Shows what you know about it,” Bull said. “He was out here on a business trip looking to buy into some cattle ranching. Then somebody put a bee in his bonnet about the Lost Gold Mine and he went clear off his head with gold fever.”

  “You talk like somebody who knows.”

  “I seen him! I met him. Lord Dennis. That’s how he was called.”

  “You don’t tell me!”

  “Swear to die,” Bull solemnly declared. “It happened when I was working for Donovan at the B Square B. Lord Dennis came out to the ranch at Colonel Tim’s invite, him and his whole crowd. They stayed overnight in the ranch house. Donovan threw ’em a big barbecue and party.

  “There’s some good hunting in the Black Mesa country at the edge of the B Square range. The colonel took Lord Dennis hunting for elk, bighorn sheep, and even mountain lions. The Englishman was crazy for hunting too, I’ll give him that. I went along. I was Donovan’s top man on the B Square.

  “As for them creature comforts you was talking about, the Englishman did all right by himself, believe you me. You should’ve seen the outfit he was traveling with—a dozen people or more. He had his own cook with him and a couple flunky menservants and more trunks and bags than you ever did see.”

  Bull’s voice went all raspy and husky. “Why, he even brought a couple fancy gals with him.”

  “Aw go on,” Sixkiller said as if in disbelief, hoping to encourage the other to continue.

  “It’s the gospel truth,” Bull declared. “His main woman was named Val something or something Val and man was she something! Another foreigner, only she was from Italy. She could speak good English, though. She was tricked out like a circus queen and built like a brick you-know-what, with a figure that’d make a fire-and-brimstone preacher put aside the Good Book and do bad.”

  “That’s what I call traveling in style,” Sixkiller said.

  “He brought a couple other girls along for his pals in the party. They was only regular American whores, but damned good-looking. But that Val gal was something special, his own personal, private stock.

  “He
ll he had to have been loco to go scrabbling around in the hills looking for a lost mine when he could have been laying up in a feather bed with that beauty. I tell you, Quinto, you never seed the like!

  “And where did it all get Lord Dennis?” Bull asked, sighing, shaking his shaggy head sadly. “Robbed and kilt along with all the rest of his party, and brother, that was a crying shame. A wasteful loss of a purty woman.”

  “Maybe he found the lost mine and that’s why he and the others were killed . . . to protect the secret,” Sixkiller said.

  “Man, you don’t let go of that lost gold mine, do you?”

  “You don’t let go of a dream so easily, Bull.”

  “That’s all it is, Quinto, a dream. Nope, if he or anybody else found the mine some of that gold would have turned up by now, almost two months later. You know how gold seekers are. You’re one yourself. Could you find that yellow gold and sit on it and keep it a secret all this time without spending some of it? Could anyone?”

  “They could if they wanted to keep from hanging,” Sixkiller said.

  “Don’t need no lost gold mine for that, hombre. Lord Dennis and his party was a big fat target. There’s rannies on the Glint who’d cut your throat for a pair of boots or just for the fun of it. The Englishman had plenty of money and stuff worth stealing. Plenty of owlhoots would have jumped them just to get their hands on the women. They’d get their necks stretched by a rope for a rape, so they might as well kill them all off, anyhow. Dead men tell no tales, and dead gals neither.

  “The only gold out of Lonesome Hills is whatever Lord Dennis was carrying on him, which could have been a tidy sum. He always had plenty of ready cash for living high and he paid in gold,” Bull said, finishing up.

  “Wonder who got it?” Sixkiller asked.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dinner was served—a stew that was mostly fat, gristle, and greasy gravy, along with a big slab of stale bread laid across it like a roofing tile. A tin cup filled with rusty-tasting water also sat on the metal tray.

  Sixkiller was unsure which was more dangerous, the stew or the water. He sat on the edge of his bunk, feet on the floor, picking and pecking at the meal.

  He was not usually an overly fastidious feeder. Quite the reverse, considering some of the scraps and slops he’d eaten as a kid growing up in the Nations, the questionable rations when he was a soldier fighting in the War, and the more recent privations on the manhunt trail.

  Bull reached into his stew with thumb and index finger, plucking out a cockroach whose body was the size of a .45 cartridge. He held it up for Sixkiller to see. “Looky what I found,” he said, with a certain grim cheerfulness in hardship.

  “At least you got some meat in yours,” Sixkiller said.

  “It’s dead. I think the stew killed it.”

  “Stew? Is that what this is?”

  Bull squashed the roach between his fingers, wiping them clean on the underside of the bunk.

  Later, Porrock came to collect the trays. “How’d you boys like your chow?” He grinned, needling them.

  “The bug in my stew liked it better than I did and he’s dead. The food was lousy and such small portions, too.”

  “You should have thought of that before you started fighting,” Porrock said. “Ringgold ain’t rolling in money, you know. The town pays us a certain stipend per day to feed the prisoners and you got to make do with what we got.”

  “How about letting us use our own money to get some food sent in from the café?” Sixkiller asked.

  “And some drink,” Bull chimed in.

  “What money?” Porrock asked.

  “The money you took from us when we were locked up,” Sixkiller said.

  “That ain’t your money. Not till the court says so. It’s being held against your fines and damages.”

  “So you’re saying my money ain’t my money.”

  “That’s right. You got it. That is, you don’t got it.” Porrock stacked the trays the prisoners had slid through the rectangular slot at the base of the cell door, readying to leave.

  “When Wheeler comes to relieve me for dinner break, I’m gonna go over to the Bon Ton café and have me a thick, juicy steak, some of them fried potatoes, and a quart of ale. Mmm!” Porrock exited, juicily smacking his lips.

  “I’d like to tie that scrawny pencil neck of his into knots,” Bull said feelingly.

  Time passed, the window in the wall of Sixkiller’s cell becoming a rectangle of blackness dully lit by the glow of unseen lamps and lanterns.

  Porrock went off duty, replaced by Chet Wheeler who stuck his head into the holding area. “Still with us, are you boys? Don’t go away.”

  The night hours dragged on. Sometimes the prisoners talked, others times passages of silence hung between them. The talk grew less and the silences longer.

  The bunk was too small for Sixkiller, of course. He lay on his side, back to the wall, legs folded, listening to the insect life all a-stir inside the straw mattress. He drifted in and out of an uncomfortable half sleep.

  Bull slept deep, snoring, his breathing sounding like a dull crosscut saw biting into a hard log. It was counterpointed by a full spectrum of gasps, groans, gurgles, throat clearings, chokings, hackings, buzzings, and such.

  A light sleeper, Sixkiller came fully awake during a late night hour. Moonlight shone through the window, the shadows of the bars inky black, clear cut and solid in the luminous silvery glow of moonbeams.

  He thought about the facts of the case, having memorized the material as Vandaman had relayed it to him.

  He grunted. Where was Vandaman now? Sleeping the night away in a comfortable bed somewhere in Laramie, most likely, waiting for him to send word to bring a posse into Ringgold. . . with guns blazing.

  Shaking his head, Sixkiller sat up and reviewed the names of the members of the Bletchley party, starting with Lord Dennis Bletchley, whose Grand Tour of the West was curtailed by an obsessive quest for a lost gold mine in the Lonesome Hills.

  Sir Montague “Monty” Dawlish. Bletchley’s lifelong friend, drinking and whoring companion.

  Russell. Bletchley’s adult nephew and ostensible heir.

  Pelton. Bletchley’s valet who had been with him for twenty years and more.

  Osbert and Beryl Hodder. A married couple, he was a cook and she a maidservant.

  They were all English.

  In America, Lord Dennis’s road show had picked up W. T. Claiborne. Business agent and tour organizer hired by a U.S. branch of Bleth-ley’s British bank.

  Gage Noland. Westerner and trail guide. Terry Bails, Noland’s partner, an ace packer and wrangler. Yellow Snake, their Shoshoni Indian handyman.

  Madge Elliott and Rima Janes. Two fresh and juicy young whores the party had acquired in St. Louis.

  Nicola Valletta, La Valletta as she was called. Bletchley’s beautiful, exotic mistress, born and raised on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea.

  That was the permanent party. Quite a group! They would have created a stir wherever they went.

  All dead, with the possible exception of La Valletta according to Dean Richmond.

  As happened, Sixkiller believed him, but more than two months had passed since Dean had last seen La Valletta as Bart Skillern’s captive plaything.

  A lot could have happened since then. Most likely, the Utah Kid had tired of his beautiful toy and broken it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ringgold must be on the rise, Sixkiller thought. It had its own town hall building. Most frontier towns held their civil proceedings in the likeliest local structure, usually a saloon. The advantage was that after official business was concluded the politicians could buy the voters a drink.

  Ringgold’s town hall was a wooden-framed, two-story building. The courtroom was on the ground floor. At one end, a wooden platform had been raised eighteen inches above the floor and placed at right angles to the room’s long axis. Centered on it was a table and a high-backed chair, the high throne from which judge or
justice of the peace conducted the proceedings.

  To one side of the dais at floor level was a small writing table and armless chair. Opposite the dais was a central square of a half-dozen, wooden benches arranged in rows. They were narrow, backless, and uncomfortable.

  In the front row, facing the platform, Sixkiller and Bull sat side by side, bracketed by Braddock and Wheeler. Porrock had stayed back at the jail to handle any marshalling business that might arise while they were in court.

  A handful of spectators buzzed around the courtroom. Some looked like they worked in other offices in the building, town hall insiders come to kill time before going to work. A couple stood near the open double doors, chatting and joking with each other.

  Others were idlers and loafers, old men and drunks mostly, waiting for the saloons to open so they could start cadging spare coins to buy that first morning eye-opener.

  Reeve Westbrook entered. He was spiffily dressed with a breezy manner, despite a pronounced paleness.

  Hangover, thought Sixkiller.

  Westbrook paused to hobnob with some of the insiders standing near the entrance. They greeted him with familiarity and signs of welcome. He caught Sixkiller’s eye and gave him a jaunty little wave. Sixkiller nodded.

  Westbrook pulled his silver flask from a hip pocket and drank from it, spots of color showing on his cheeks. He passed the flask around to his compadres.

  Bull watched enviously, unconsciously smacking his lips several times.

  A door in the wall behind the writing desk opened and a man entered the courtroom. He was middle-aged, pasty-faced. Under one arm, he carried a ledger and a seat cushion. He set the ledger down on the writing desk. He was the court clerk.

  He stepped up on the dais, went behind the table, pulled out the high-backed chair, and set the cushion down on the seat, arranging it rather fussily until it was positioned just so.

  He went to the writing desk and sat down behind it, pulling on a pair of ink-proof, sleeve-protector cuffs. He opened up the ledger, dipped a steel-quill pen into the inkwell and wrote an entry at the top of a new page.