Crossing Fire River

by Ralph Cotton

  “No,” said Caldwell in Beadlow’s defense, “he’s been with us all day.” But before reaching past Beadlow and opening the door, Caldwell asked, “Was the man who robbed you wearing a checkered shirt?”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Hell yes, he was! Did you come upon him? He’s riding my red roan and leading his worn-out horse behind him.”

  “No, we didn’t see him on our way here,” Dawson replied for Caldwell as the deputy and the prisoner walked inside, “but we’re planning to catch up to him as soon as we drop this man off. The man you’re talking about got away from us this morning. I expect he ran his horse out by the time he reached you. Which way did he go?”

  The man said, “He was riding due east toward the old Apache trail around the fort. I came to in time to see his dust. The way he was riding, he’ll likely run out of transportation again before the day is over.”

  “Unless he robs somebody else,” Dawson replied, gazing off across the wavering desert floor beyond the fort.

  After the lawmen had turned Beadlow over to the guards on duty, they stayed only long enough to see that he was locked safely behind bars. Then they rode out of the fort and made their rounds of all the drinking establishments, both weathered shack and ragged tents that surrounded the fort’s perimeter.

  “Nothing,” Caldwell said, stopping at the last, the dirtiest and lowest-looking saloon of the bunch. “You don’t suppose something bad has happened to him, do you?” he asked Dawson, who stood beside him. They had led their horse the length and breadth of the squalor.

  Looking around, Dawson said, “You mean something worse than this?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Drunk or sober, Shaw has a way of taking care of himself.”

  Across a rutted wagon path from them, a mere skeleton of a woman walked out of a small tent wearing nothing but a dingy gray towel over her bare shoulder. She carried a tin pan of wash water in her hands, which she threw out into the dirt. Before she turned and walked back inside, the two lawmen saw her give them a drug-encumbered smile and cup a thin blue-veined breast toward them. Needle marks stood out, red and scabbed over in the crook of her badly bruised arm.

  “What makes him do it?” Caldwell asked, not really expecting an answer, not really wanting one.

  Dawson only looked at him for a moment—they both knew Shaw’s reasons and there was no need to discuss them. “He’s not here. Let’s ride,” he said grimly.

  Chapter 17

  From their wagon seat, Jane Crowly and Ed Baggs had seen the lone rider racing across the rolling sand hills in front of them. He rode a desert trail that stretched waterless for miles and circled east of Fort Carrick, the sort of trail a man traveled only when he did not want to be seen or followed, Jane and Ed both thought, watching him. The rider left behind him a tall rise of dust that had barely settled a half hour later, when their wagon rounded the string of low hills he’d disappeared behind.

  “Hold up, Ed,” Jane said, spotting the rider lying facedown in the sand. “It looks like this damned fool has broke his neck.” The rider’s worn-out horse stood spread-legged ten yards away.

  “Looks like he come near killing his poor cayuse first,” Baggs added, stopping the wagon and pulling back the brake handle as Jane picked up a small rubber-coated water bag and jumped down. She walked forward, her shotgun in hand.

  Jane looked back along his trail, judging where he’d come from and speculating why he’d been in such a hurry. When she stood over him, her shotgun ready if she should need it, she said down to the rider’s back, “Hey, idiot, are you dead or alive?”

  After a silent moment she reached out with the toe of her boot and gave him a sharp nudge. “What’s the deal?” Ed called out, walking over to her from the wagon.

  “I was right, he must’ve broke his fool neck—” Jane’s words were interrupted by a rasping voice speaking into the sand, saying, “Wa-water . . .”

  “Well, I’ll be damned; he’s alive,” said Jane. She and Baggs looked at each other in surprise.

  Squatting down to the fallen horseman, Jane rolled him over until his bare head rested on her crooked knee. “Here, hero, drink this.” She held the uncapped water bag to his dry, dusty lips and poured a small trickle of tepid water into his mouth.

  The smell of the water caused the exhausted horse to stagger over to her. “Poor critter,” Baggs said. “A man ought to be whipped, treating a horse this way.” He picked up the rider’s hat lying on the ground, dusted it and poured some water into it for the parched animal. On Jane’s knee, the rider strangled a little, coughed and perched his lips for more water.

  “Hold on, idiot,” Jane said, “I didn’t take you to raise. This water’s got to last us to Banton.” Yet even as she protested she poured another thin trickle into his mouth.

  Squinting up at her in the glaring sunlight, the man swallowed another sip and managed to say in a breaking voice, “Who . . . are you folks?”

  “We’re not Apache,” Jane said. “The way you were riding, it looked like you thought you had a whole nest of them stirred up and coming after you.” As she spoke, she reached down, slipped his Colt from its holster and shoved it down into her belt.

  The man didn’t answer. But he took note of his gun being lifted as he scooted up onto her knee a little and looked back along his trail. “Thank God you came along. I was done for,” he said in a cracking voice, as if his gratitude had brought him to tears.

  “Don’t get blubbery on me,” Jane said. “You can’t afford to lose any tears.” She stood up, helping him to his feet with her. “Were you headed anyplace special, or just seeing how soon you’d die out here?”

  “Over near Banton,” the man said, ignoring her sharp tongue. He stood shakily, his arm looped around her shoulders, and looked at the wagon sitting in the wavering heat. The little bay she’d borrowed from Shaw stood beside the wagon, hitched to it by a lead rope. “I’ve got folks there.”

  “I know everybody around Banton,” Jane said. “Who are your folks?”

  “My folks are”—the man stumbled a step; Jane grabbed him for support, but with a speed Jane hadn’t felt him capable of, the man snatched his Colt from her waist, cocked it and shoved it into her flat, hard belly—“none of your damned business, she-male!” he said, his arm tightening from across her shoulders to around her neck. “Drop the shotgun or I’ll bust you wide open!”

  “Damn it, I knew this was a trap,” Jane said, angry at herself for being taken in. “I had to jump down and help this lousy turd.” She threw the shotgun aside, disgusted. “What the hell’s wrong with me?”

  “We don’t have time to figure that out,” said Stanley Booker. He looked at Baggs, who stood wide-eyed, his hands going chest high instinctively. “You, drop that sidearm and back off.”

  “Don’t hurt her, Mister,” Baggs pleaded. “She was only trying to help you.”

  “Only way she could have helped me was to kill my ma before I was born,” said Booker. He shoved Jane away from him. “Both of yas walk away from here ’til you hear me leave. I see either of you look back, I’ll put a bullet in both your coconuts.”

  Jane and Ed turned and started walking away across the desert floor, the sun beating down on them. “If you ever see me try to render a humanitarian act toward another man, you have my permission to put your boot straight up my ass, hard as you can stick it.”

  “I’ll do it, too,” Ed said, walking stiffly, afraid to turn and see what the outlaw was doing. Noting the water bag in Jane’s hand, he said, “He forgot to take our water bag. As long as we’ve got it, we ain’t likely to die.” He gave a wink and a grin.

  “Jesus, Ed,” Jane whispered with a wince, “you need to talk a little louder; he might not have heard you real clear.”

  Baggs lowered his voice and repeated, “I said, he forgot to take our—”

  “Damn it, Ed,” said Jane, cutting him short. “I heard you well enough the first time. Why you start whispering?”

  “I don’t know,
” said Baggs. He ducked his head and kept walking.

  A hundred yards out they ventured to turn and look back when they heard the sound of their wagon horses’ hooves pounding away along the hard-packed trail. “Well, there he goes,” Ed said. The outlaw rode away hard on the little bay after cutting the team horses loose and shooing them with a slap on their broad rumps. “We’ll be the rest of the day gathering these horses, but at least we’re both in one piece. . . . No harm done.”

  “Speak for yourself, Ed,” Jane said, sulking, “I’m harmed, damned well harmed. He should just as well have killed me as to humiliate me this way. This is the last time I’ll ride shotgun. I ain’t fit for the job.”

  “Hell, Jane, don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Ed. “This could have happened to anybody.” He hitched his trousers up a notch on his round belly and started walking in the direction of the fleeing wagon horses. Jane sighed heavily and walked along behind him.

  Dawson and Caldwell spotted the wagon as they rode onto a sand rise and looked out across the rolling hills. But by the time they had ridden straight to the wagon, Jane and Ed Baggs had gathered their horses, hitched them and tied together the leads where Booker had cut them with a boot knife. Booker had taken Jane’s shotgun and Baggs’ big dragoon pistol.

  “I feel naked as a bride,” Jane had said, seeing the two riders coming toward them in a rise of dust. Looking all around in the sand, she shook her head in disgust and said, “There ain’t a rock around here to chuck at them.”

  “I’m betting we won’t need rocks; guns neither,” said Baggs, eyeing the riders as they drew nearer.

  “Oh, why’s that, Ed?” Jane said sarcastically. “You figure they’ll kill us before they get much closer?”

  Baggs eyed her and said, “You always expect the worse, don’t you?”

  “I’m no grinning idiot, Ed, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied with a frown. “What’s got you so optimistic anyway?”

  “I ain’t optimistic,” Baggs said. “But I ain’t always expecting some kind of disaster befalling me.”

  “Expect it? Hell, I count on it, Ed,” Jane said. She wiped dust from her face with her shirtsleeve and stared out with him. “I wish I at least had a sharp stick to poke at them,” she murmured under her breath. “I hate dying without a fight.”

  “If you’re that concerned they’re going to kill us, hop up and we’ll light out of here,” said Baggs.

  “What’s the use running now?” Jane said, seeing the faces of the two riders as Dawson and Caldwell slowed their horses. “We can’t get away in this damned wagon. All we’d do is piss them off.”

  “Here they are, and we ain’t dead yet,” Baggs said sidelong to her as he raised a hand toward the two dust-covered horsemen.

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll ride on and leave us be,” Jane called out in a threatening tone.

  Baggs looked at her.

  “It’s worth a try,” she whispered.

  “We’re lawmen, ma’am, in pursuit of a felon,” Dawson called out. They had been watching Jane and Baggs gather their horses and bring them back to the wagon for the past half hour through sun glare and wavering heat. “It looks like you might have crossed paths with him.” He gestured down at the single set of hoofprints leading to the wagon, then turning to two sets as they led away.

  “Well, hell yes, of course we saw him,” Jane said. In an accusing tone she went on. “If you two hadn’t took so damned long getting here, maybe you could have shot the sumbitch before he took our guns and stole my riding horse.” She gestured off in Booker’s direction. “Now he’s got one resting while he’s riding another. He’ll be harder to catch.”

  Dawson and Caldwell nudged their horses closer and looked down at the two teamsters. “Sorry about your horse, ma’am,” Dawson said, touching his hat brim.

  “You don’t look none too broken up about it,” Jane said. “Anyways, it wasn’t my horse. A fellow loaned it to me the other day. I was taking it back to him. Now I can’t bear thinking I have to face him, tell him the animal’s gone.”

  “I’m Marshal Cray Dawson, ma’am,” said Dawson. “This is Deputy Jed Caldwell.”

  “Ma’am, Mister,” said Caldwell, touching his hat brim toward them in turn. “With any luck we’ll catch him and get your horse back for you,” he said to Jane.

  “I won’t miss any meals waiting for it,” Jane said in a cynical tone.

  “I’m Ed Baggs,” said Ed, “and my shotgun rider here is Miss Jane Crowly. Pay no attention to Jane here. She’s got a big mad on over that borrowed horse getting stolen from her.”

  “And our guns, Ed,” Jane said. “Don’t miss a chance to tell some stranger we got our guns snatched right out of our hands.”

  Baggs gave a dark chuckle. “Hell, what’s the difference he stole our guns? I always say, so long as you’re alive, you ain’t lost nothing.”

  “I almost wish I’d catch him before you two do,” Jane said Dawson. “I’d love to get my shotgun back and unload it on his worthless ass.”

  “What’s this fellow wanted for?” Baggs asked, staring out as if Booker might come riding back into sight at any minute.

  Caldwell took a breath and went into Booker’s list of crimes. “He’s wanted for murder, forgery, train robbery, cattle rustling—”

  “We get it,” Jane said, cutting him off. “He’s one of them kind, wanted for every low act under the sun.”

  “Yep, he’s one of them kind,” said Caldwell.

  Jane eyed the soft-spoken deputy’s cut-off black gloved fingers, his well-trimmed dark beard, his string tie and brocaded vest. “Wait a minute, I’ve heard the name Caldwell. You’re the one they call the Undertaker, ain’t you?”

  “Well, yes, Miss Jane.” Caldwell looked a little embarrassed. “As it turns out, I am that person, although I only recently learned of it.”

  Jane planted both hands on her slim hips and looked at the two as if in a new light. “Ed, these fellows are the two lawmen I was telling you about a while back, the ones sent down to clean up the border, if you can believe such a thing is possible.”

  “That is us, ma’am,” said Dawson. “I expect if we didn’t think it was possible we wouldn’t have taken on the job.”

  “I meant no offense,” Jane said. “The fact is, now that I know who you two are, I’m feeling better about the odds on me ever getting that borrowed horse back. At least I can tell the fellow we’ve got some high-handed first-class lawmen hunting it down for us.”

  “You can tell him we will do our best to get the horse back for you, ma’am,” Caldwell put in, ignoring the high-handed remark.

  “I hope so,” Jane said, “because the man who lent it to me is not a man I would want to disappoint if I was you.”

  “Oh, and who is this fellow?” Caldwell asked.

  “It ain’t so much who he is as what he is,” Jane replied.

  “He is one tough hombre, by her account of him,” Baggs put in before she cold continue.

  Jane frowned at Baggs for butting in. “Oh, excuse me, Ed, was you talking? I thought it was me.”

  Baggs grumbled and fell silent.

  “The fellow’s name is Lawrence, and I saw him butt whip a gunman who works for one of the most powerful men in these parts.”

  “Lawrence, eh?” said Dawson. Making the connection, he and Caldwell looked at each other knowingly. “Now, where have I heard that name before?” he feigned with a slight grin.

  “I don’t know,” said Jane, “but that’s all the name he goes by. The horse he lent me is one of two horses he took from a couple of wild outlaws who had the misfortune of tangling with him.”

  “He sounds like a tough hombre,” Dawson said almost with a sigh of relief. He relaxed in his saddle and said, “Why don’t we accompany you two to Banton, since you’re both having to travel unarmed.”

  “What about catching that rascal?” She nodded in the direction Booker had taken.

  “He’ll keep �
�til morning,” said Dawson. “This Lawrence fellow is more important right now.”

  “Why’s that?” Jane asked cautiously.

  “I believe he’s a man we’ve been searching for,” said Dawson.

  “He’s not in any trouble with the law is he?” Jane asked with a wary look.

  “No, ma’am,” said Dawson, “he’s no outlaw. We’re looking for him for other reasons.” He and Caldwell stepped their horses aside and gestured the two up into the wagon seat. As soon as the wagon began to roll forward the two lawmen fell in alongside and rode with them across the sand hills in the tracks left by the fleeing outlaw and the two horses.

  Chapter 18

  Shaw sat atop the speckled barb looking down onto the riders from a black slice of evening shade on the rocky hillside. He’d left the paint horse at the town livery, wanting to slip across Fire River and back as easily and quietly as possible. As soon as Hewes and his men had ridden past, he gave the barb a touch of his boot heels and rode a thin trail down out of the hills. He knew where Hewes and his men were going; they were looking for him.

  When he reached the shelter of a tree line along Fire River, he waited a few minutes until darkness set in. Then he eased the barb into the shallow water and rode across at a slow, silent walk, the horse moving as if it knew the danger lying ahead of them.

  Topping a rise in the direction he’d sent the string of horses with the bodies over their backs, he spotted a campfire glowing in the distant darkness. “We don’t want to go there,” he whispered to the speckled barb, and he turned the animal wide of the campfire and rode on.

  Deeper into a wide valley he spotted more light in the darkness ahead of him. This time the glow came from the windows of the hacienda silhouetted against the purple sky. When he’d ridden closer he spotted a slim crack of light seeping out between two large barn doors. He rode toward it as he drew closer to the hacienda, slipping his rifle from its boot and laying it across his lap.

  In the darker shadows of a weathered cottonwood tree, he stepped down from his saddle, hitched the barb’s reins and slipped away quietly toward the crack of light, his rifle in hand.