by Ralph Cotton
“If you can’t pay the fine, you’ll have to forfeit your horse and mule,” Junior called out loud enough for the gathering bystanders to hear.
“Either that, or I’ll beat them both into the dirt, let you watch me do it.” DeLaurie grinned, patting the ax handle a little more intensely.
“Shame on you,” said Dawson in a lowered tone, his stare turning cold and unreadable.
“Yeah, shame on you, DeLaurie,” Junior said in a mocking tone. He turned to the stocky gunman. “Newhouse, gather the animals. This man can’t pay his fine.”
“No, wait,” said Dawson, raising a halting hand, “I can pay it. Just let me get my money out.” He swung the canvas bag of supplies down from his shoulder and held it out, saying, “Here, hold this.”
Newhouse obliged him instinctively, taking the canvas bag by its neck with both hands before thinking, Oh no!
Instantly, the gunman realized his mistake, but by then it was too late. Dawson’s Colt had already streaked from its holster. The gun barrel caught the stocky gunman full swing across his left temple, sending him backward. Dawson took the canvas bag back from his hands and turned with it quickly, just in time to feel the ax handle swing against it with a hard thud, hitting sacks of flour and beans instead of his rib cage.
Junior, Remington in hand, stood stunned, frozen in place for a moment, seeing the gun barrel fly back-handed across the bridge of DeLaurie’s nose with a terrible sound of gunmetal against crunching cartilage. The sight of it caused him to snap into action, but he had already hesitated too long. As he raised his Remington, the ax handle struck a wicked blow against the back of his hand and sent the gun sliding across the plank boardwalk toward Darvin Arden.
“Hell’s fire!” Junior shouted, grabbing his stinging hand and looking up in amazement, as if puzzled by how DeLaurie’s ax handle had turned against him.
Seeing the question in Junior’s puzzled eyes, Dawson said as he drew the ax handle back for a more powerful swing, “Sleep on it.”
But before he could swing the ax handle, Dawson heard a shotgun cock, and a voice called out, “Hold it right there! You’re not killing my son!”
With the handle still drawn back, Dawson cut his gaze to the man holding the shotgun. “Easy with that scattergun,” he said. “If I meant to kill him, he’d be dead already.”
“Says you!” Junior managed to cut in.
“Shut up, boy!” shouted Giddis Black Senior. His shotgun remained aimed at Dawson, ready to fire. But knowing that the spread of buckshot would hit his son as well, he said to Dawson, “Back away from him!”
“No,” Dawson responded. “If you’re going to shoot, do it now, where I stand. Me and Junior will go down together. Does that suit you, Junior?”
“It doesn’t suit me!” Darvin Arden said before the young man could reply. All three of the men turned their eyes to the old sailor. Standing unsteadily on his only foot, Arden held the displaced Remington pointed and cocked at Junior. “Lower the shotgun, Giddis,” he said, “or by Odin, I’ll kill him with his own gun!”
“You’re going way too far with me, Cap,” Giddis Black said in a menacing tone. “I don’t know how we’ll ever get along after this.”
“Don’t threaten me, Giddis,” said Arden. “I’m old enough to die.” He nodded toward the younger man. “But what about Junior there? Is he?” He squinted, taking aim down the pistol barrel.
“Looks like you’re the cock of the walk today, Cap,” Giddis said, lowering the shotgun, but giving the old sailor an evil stare. “There now, the gun is down. Lower the Remington and lay it on the planks.”
“Not yet, Giddis,” said the old sailor, wobbling a bit. He gestured for a young boy in the gathering crowd to hand him his peg leg. Taking it, he looked it over, put his stub of a leg into its leather shell, and strapped it deftly into place. Satisfied that the peg was all right, he gave Dawson a nod.
“Pa, don’t let him get away with this,” said Junior. “His name is Dawson. He’s some kind of fast gunman, otherwise he’d be dead. We never had a chance!” He still held his swelling purple hand.
“You’re Crayton Dawson?” Giddis Senior asked, beginning to understand why things had gone the way they did.
Dawson only nodded and said, “I’m going to tell you the same thing I tried to tell your son. I met your men Palmer and Willie Goode on the trail. I told Palmer I’d be resupplying here before going up to my claim. He agreed to it. That was what I’d been doing when your boy and his pals started goading me. I’m not a man who takes much goading, as you can see.” He gestured at the two downed gunmen. “Now I’m taking my supplies and I’m leaving. If you doubt my story you can take it up with Palmer when he gets back.”
“I will, sir, you can count on it,” said Giddis Black. He looked all around, seeing a few of his thugs showing up and hanging back waiting for word from him. But upon judging what might happen to Junior in the midst of a melee, he took a deep breath and allowed calm reasoning to take command. “If you’re all through here, take your supplies and leave.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” said Dawson, knowing Black had only told him to leave to give the appearance of being the one in charge.
Giddis Senior held a hand toward his men, keeping them in check while Dawson and Darvis Arden stepped into their saddles and rode away. Dawson kept an eye back on the boardwalk where the Blacks stood watching them with grim expressions.
Before Dawson and the old sailor were out of sight, Junior said, “I’ll kill him, Pa, I swear to God, him and that little peg-leg bastard both!”
Giddis Senior said to his son under his breath, “You ignorant whelp. You’re lucky that man didn’t kill you and these two wart heads. He could have done so three times over!”
“Pa, I was only—”
“Shut up,” said Senior. “You sicken me! Gather your gun and these fools, and get out of my sight!”
Outside Black’s Cut, Dawson and the old sailor had just turned onto another trail leading up in the direction Arden said would take them to Deeb’s claim, when they saw Willie Goode driving the wagon into town. “My goodness, now, look at big ole Willie!” said Arden, gesturing toward Willie’s thickly wrapped forearm.
“Palmer doesn’t look much better,” said Dawson, wondering what had happened after he’d left them on the trail. On the wagon seat next to Willie, Palmer sat slumped back, his head a-loll, his face covered with wet bloody strips of torn shirt cloth. He held a bloody handful of the same cloth to his stomach. Halting, Dawson said to Arden, “If you’re in no hurry to get back, I’d like to ride back along the trail and see what became of the two women.”
“After what’s happened between me and the Blacks,” the old sailor chuckled, “I’m in no hurry to ever go back there.”
As the wagon rolled by, the two slipped back onto the trail behind it and rode away in the opposite direction. “I have a hunch that riding with you, Cray Dawson, is going to be the most fun I’ve had on dry land.” Arden laughed, putting his heels to his sorrel mule.
Chapter 14
Clarity Jones had slid and rolled and come out of her wool coat. The front of her dress had been shredded and torn away. The razor had flown from her grip when her hands scratched and dug at loose rock and dirt before she felt her body slipping over the edge of a narrow rock shelf and into an airy world of nothingness. But before her scraped and battered forearms left that last few inches of ground, her fingers hooked like steel claws into a tangle of tough twisted tree roots that hung out of the earth’s belly. For a moment she had only swung there in a cool breeze, seeing her coat billow out as it plunged downward. She had screamed, but only once, not being a screamer like some of the whores she had come to know during her brief tenure in the life.
Now, sitting on the upper edge of the cliff, smoking a short, slim cigar stub, she looked down at her coat lying below and told herself screaming would not have helped. But now, what to do about keeping herself alive? she wondered.
When she
’d finished her smoke, she crushed the cigar stub on a flat rock, stood up, and cupped her tattered dress to her scraped and bruised bosom. She did this not out of modesty, but rather to protect herself from the chilling afternoon air. Looking all around, she saw the flattened stems of wild grass where Willie had dragged Violet’s body off into the thicker pine woodlands.
She wasn’t sure where she should go from here, but she knew that upon seeing the cutting job she’d given Willie and Sly Palmer, Giddis Black would be sending someone out to make certain she was dead. She sighed and tracked along the bent grass, limping a bit, having lost a shoe in her near calamity. Well, send them on, then, Giddis . . . she said to herself as if speaking to Black. She wouldn’t be here, not if she could help it.
Ten minutes passed before she reached the edge of a five-foot-high cut bank and looked down at Violet’s pale naked corpse lying spread-eagle beside a thin stream of water. She wore nothing but her shoes, her dead eyes staring up at Clarity in horror. Her clothes lay in a discarded pile a few feet away. “Oh no, Willie, you wretched swive! You did her! You rotten, mad, sick, bastard!” she cried aloud, scurrying down the cut bank to Violet’s side as if arriving there any quicker would make some sort of difference.
But kneeling at Violet’s side, seeing the blackened bulge where her neck had been snapped by Willie’s powerful hands, Clarity let the reality of death sink in. “I’m sorry, pet, there’s nothing I can do for you.” She sniffled, brushed aside a strand of hair from Violet’s cold forehead, and closed her eyes. As she crossed Violet’s arms on her abdomen and closed her spread legs together, she couldn’t help but see there were no signs of Willie having done anything more than undressing the body and perhaps taking himself a good long peek. She found something in the image of that just as repulsing as her first thoughts on the matter. “You sick miserable fiend,” she murmured aloud.
She spent the next few minutes taking Violet’s shoes from her cold dead feet and stepping into them. She put on Violet’s wool coat against the cool afternoon. Then, noting that Violet’s clothes had been ripped from her, she dressed the body as best she could and dragged it farther away from the braided stream.
“I’m so sorry for you, dear Violet,” she whispered, in place of a prayer; and she raked in loose dirt, rock, and seasoned pine needles and partially covered her, in hopes someone would find her who could do more.
Almost an hour later the long shadows of evening found her walking wearily alongside the trail, the wool coat buttoned fully up the front, steam beginning to waft in her breath. When she first spotted the two riders coming toward her along the trail, she did not attempt to hide. Instead she stood staring at them in stunned silence, her hand going into the coat pocket for a razor that wasn’t there.
“Miss Clarity,” said Darvin Arden, hopping down from his mule as Dawson also slipped down from his horse, “are you all right, child?” Seeing her swoon, he caught her by both shoulders to steady her.
At first Dawson saw her hand come out of her coat pocket in a threatening manner, as if she held a knife, he thought. But then she blinked her eyes, gained her focus and senses, and, recognizing the old sailor said, “Cap? Oh, Cap! Something terrible has happened!” She turned her head and stared along the trail behind her. “I’m afraid Black’s men are coming to kill me!”
Arden gave Dawson a strange look, then replied gently to the confused woman, “Not from that direction, darling. I’m afraid you’ve been walking right back toward Black’s Cut.”
“Oh my God!” said Clarity with a terrified look on her face. “I would have walked right into Giddis Black’s arms.”
“Not now you won’t,” said Arden. He guided her to the side of the trail and seated her on a rock. “We’ll get you away from here, won’t we, Dawson?” He looked to Dawson for support. Dawson nodded.
“Where is the other woman, the one I saw you with earlier?” he asked as he took his canteen from his saddle horn, uncapped it, and handed it to her.
She looked at him closely. “That was you, the one who stood up to Willie and Sly?” Before he could answer she said, “Violet wanted to ask for your help. I wish we had. It might have saved her life.” She gave them both a grim, flat stare. “Violet is dead. Willie snapped her neck like a—”
“Like a chicken’s,” said Arden, finishing her words for her.
“Yes, like a chicken’s,” she said in a softer tone, one in which she made no attempt at hiding her regret. She took a sip from the canteen, then added, “She and I used to laugh at that term, chicken style, as if it were funny or cute the way he would threaten us gals with it. What fools we were, Violet and me. We thought we were Black’s special girls. What did we know?”
Dawson and Arden stood by silently, letting her get things off her chest. She sipped the water again, then handed the canteen back to Dawson and wiped the wool coat sleeve across her wet dirt-streaked mouth. “Giddis wanted us both dead because we had seen too much—the way he robbed people, the way he had men tortured, killed.” She looked at Arden, then at Dawson. “Giddis is sick in his head. He keeps a man on a chain, you know?”
“Yes, I know,” said Arden. “But let’s not worry about any of that right now. Let’s get you up and out of here before some of Black’s men do come riding up on us.” He gestured toward Dawson and said to her, “This is Cray Dawson. He just showed both Giddis and Junior up as cowards in front of the town. They might be coming for him too.”
She looked at Dawson and seemed impressed. “You did that?”
“Well,” said Dawson, modestly, “we had a run-in. I won’t go so far as to say I made them look like cowards.”
“But I do go so far as to say it,” said Arden, helping Clarity to her feet. “And I wager that’s how Giddis feels about it now that he’s had time to mull it over and let it get stuck in his craw.” He offered a tight smile and said firmly, “All the more reason for us to get ourselves moving, eh? Once we move into the higher canyons, we’ll be hard to find.”
“We can divide up the load of supplies between all three animals and make room for you on the pack mule,” Dawson said to the woman who stood shivering in spite of her wool coat. “That is, if you don’t mind riding without a saddle.”
“Won’t that take up time?” she asked.
“No, not too long,” said Dawson.
“I mean, can I just ride with you for a while?” she asked with a stiff shrug. “Until we get more distance between us and Black’s Cut? To tell you the truth, I’m so sore all over I’m not sure I can ride a bare-back mule.”
“Pardon me, ma’am,” said Dawson, “that wasn’t very considerate of me. You take the horse, it’s a much better ride.”
“I won’t take your horse from you, Mr. Dawson,” Clarity said. Then giving him a level gaze she said, “But I am so cold, I would welcome riding double with you for a ways . . . until I start feeling a little warmer and less sore?” She had unbuttoned the coat while she spoke and exposed enough of herself to show him how scraped and cut and bruised she’d gotten from sliding over the edge of the cliff.
Dawson felt a little embarrassed but said, “Yes, ma’am, I understand. You ride with me for as long as you like.”
Arden looked on as his newly found friend raised Clarity carefully up onto the saddle, then stepped up behind her and enfolded her into his arms. He watched Dawson turn the horse gently, mindful of the woman’s tender condition. Smiling to himself, the old seaman stepped atop his mule and gave it a light whack with his boot heel and sent it off along the trail behind them.
As the two rode on, Dawson said quietly into Clarity’s ear, “Ma’am, we saw Willie and Palmer along the trail on our way back from Black’s Cut. They were both in pretty sore shape themselves. That’s why we decided to come looking for you and your friend, see what had happened to you.”
“Oh, really?” Clarity said without turning toward his voice.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dawson. “Palmer looked like he’d walked face-first into a she
wildcat.”
“Maybe he did,” she said, admitting nothing. “What about that murdering degenerate, Willie?” she asked, her English accent showing itself briefly.
“His whole forearm was bleeding through some thick cloth wrapping,” said Dawson. “He looked pale from losing blood, they both did.”
“Good, then, I hope they both die from it,” she said calmly.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dawson, not wanting to push her into talking about it if she didn’t want to.
They rode on.
When they arrived at the spot where Clarity had dragged Violet away from the water and covered her, the three hitched the animals to a shorter pine sapling and stood for a moment looking down the cut bank and the half-covered body. “Can we—can we bury her?” Clarity asked, standing huddled in Violet’s coat. “I left here hoping someday someone would. I didn’t expect to be coming right back here, myself.”
“Yes, we’ll bury her here,” said Dawson. He stepped over to the pack mule and slid a brand-new shovel from within a load of supplies. When he returned with it, they climbed down the five-foot cut bank and searched around for what looked like a dryer grave spot twenty yards farther uphill from the water’s edge.
While Arden lay watching the trail for any sign of riders, Dawson dug a grave in a softer stretch of earth on the sloping hillside. When he’d finished, he and Arden wrapped the dead woman in a blanket from Dawson’s supplies and buried her. Afterward, with an eye on the trail behind them, in the long dim shadows of evening, they rode on, taking the higher trail that Arden knew would lead them to Deeb’s claim.
Rather than risk the glow of a fire being seen, they made a dark camp in a nest of rocks on a steep hillside. The next morning Dawson awakened with the woman snuggled against him. For warmth, he told himself, repeating her words from the day before. But he had no intention of moving her away from him. Instead, he laid his arm over her and breathed in the smell of her hair on his cheek and felt her push herself even tighter against him.
