Saddle Tramps

by Owen G. Irons

I rode on, the sorrel eager enough, but nothing but a stumblebum in his movements. Like me.

  The glare of the morning sun was far too bright to look into now. I was nearly to the camp and would need my vision. Since I did not dare approach the clearing on horseback anyway, I halted the sorrel and swung down, stiff in every muscle of my body. I had to pause for a moment, leaning against the horse until a spell of dizziness passed. Then, rifle in hand, I began to circle the camp, moving through the sumac and sage as I had when I had caught up with Mosely there.

  The insects had come awake with the sun and a cloud of gnats swanned around my face and remained there as I eased through the tangle of chaparral, trying to make no sound at all, trying not to breathe loudly. Andy was there, somewhere, he with the eyes of a cat and the ears of a wolf.

  I inched along the trail, still unable to see the camp. The laurel-leaf sumac had a fresh, pungent scent to it, the sage was heavy in the air. I stepped aside a low-growing barrel cactus, with a painful remembrance of my last encounter with one. The sky had begun to pale, only a single line of beaten gold limning the eastern horizon and the birds had taken to morning wing. Doves by the hundreds going to water passed overhead, cutting sharp silhouettes. A cottontail rabbit, startled by my appearance, bounded away after a moment’s incredulous glance.

  I saw the camp through the screen of surrounding brush, and eased nearer, moving in a crouch.

  Mosely’s body had been moved from the fire ring. Andy must have searched beneath the body for the saddlebags containing the gold. Fortunately, I had not been clever enough to consider such a hiding place.

  Where was Andy!

  I saw his blue roan, head down, grazing. The dead body of Mosely continued to stare unblinkingly at the pale crystal of the sky. A butcher bird flitted past, seeking insect prey. Not far away a mule deer eyed me and slipped silently back into the brush. I waited. My neck began to itch. My hands were cramped around the rifle I carried. He had to be here, somewhere. He had to make some move, some sound. Andy was too rash to play a waiting game forever. I held my crouch, wiping at my eyes which now began to sting with perspiration. I shifted my position only by inches and heard the muffled, unmistakable ratcheting of a Colt revolver’s hammer being drawn back. I froze.

  ‘Where is it, Keogh?’ Andy said.

  ‘I don’t get you, Andy.’

  ‘I want the gold, Keogh,’ Andy said. I heard him step nearer, I felt the muzzle of his revolver nudge my back between my shoulder blades. His voice was almost carefree despite the lurking menace in his words. ‘Come on, old pal,’ he encouraged. ‘Show me where it is. First drop that rifle, will you? It makes me nervous.’

  The rifle dropped from my hands. It was no time to argue with the madman with the Colt.

  ‘Fine,’ Andy said. And damn him, he laughed! It was all a game with Andy. Even when it came to life and death it was still a game. I had long ago decided that he did not care if he lived or died – or that he did not believe that he could ever die. Nothing makes a man more dangerous.

  ‘Why did you start down this road, Andy?’ I asked. Taking a chance I turned toward him. He was smiling. Good old Andy. There was a streak of blood high on his shoulder where I had tagged him with my rifle shot.

  ‘What do you mean? Oh,’ he said, as if finally taking my meaning. He looked thoughtful as he said, ‘Why? Look at what we were, Keogh. Where we were going. We were nothing but two saddle tramps going nowhere, getting nothing for our labor half the time. It all came to me back at the old Pocono Ranch. Slattery trying to short us on our wages – how many times has that happened to us? And we would just swallow it, fork our broncs and drag the line one more time.

  ‘You know what, Keogh? When I scalped old Barry Slattery for his stash of money, it felt good! To hell with him, anyway.’

  ‘But later, Andy … killing that farmer. Taking the women. That is what tore us apart.’

  ‘Keogh, old friend!’ Andy said, with his hat tipped back, his dark curly hair tumbling out. ‘You know I didn’t mean to shoot that sodbuster. You were there!’

  ‘He died,’ I pointed out.

  ‘He died and that made us wanted men, Keogh.’ Andy was briefly angry. ‘Over trouble we didn’t start. I was only playing with Eva – you know me. Later, well, him—’ he gestured toward the dead body of Bull Mosely, ‘he caught up with me, and it seemed like time to make a deal or get my neck stretched. So we made a deal. You know all about that. Dumb clodhopper thought he was in love. Do you think Eva would ever have given into him? Good-looking woman that she is? I strung the man along, and he fell in with me on a promise.’ Andy laughed again. ‘Just a dumb old sodbuster. Believing a woman was worth all that. Keogh, there’s no woman worth that, is there?’ He paused. ‘I forgot – that’s where we differ, isn’t it, Keogh? That girl, that Mary Lou, that’s what brought us to this, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘It wasn’t the gold, it wasn’t that turned you against me – you just wanted the girl.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Andy shook his head indulgently as if to say that I was no smarter than Bull Mosely had been in his pursuit of Eva Pierce. Then he shrugged, ‘Well, I guess you’ve got her now,’ he said. Then he returned to the main subject.

  ‘Keogh, dig out that gold and we’ll split it down the middle. The way we’ve always done things, me and you. You’ll make that Mary Lou a happy girl when you show up with half of that gold. What the hell,’ Andy said with a bright, boyish smile, ‘I’m still making a better cut than I would have done splitting it with those three plowboys.’

  I wasn’t sure how to play this. The simplest thing would have been to agree with Andy and show him where I had tucked the gold away. But what then? I could not believe there was any sincerity behind his vow to split the stolen money with me. He might just take a whim and merrily gun me down.

  I knew Andy too well.

  For whatever reason, Andy had left me with my waist gun. He knew that I was only an average shot when shooting right-handed, had seen that I couldn’t hit the side of a barn with my left. Maybe it hadn’t seemed worth the bother to him, with me under the gun and him in complete control.

  My second option, therefore, was to try to draw my Colt and fire before Andy could pump me full of lead. That really was no option at all, and he knew it.

  ‘All right, Andy. Let’s split it up. I’ll show you where I hid it.’

  ‘Now you’re talking sense, Keogh. We’ve ridden too many trails together to have it end dirty. Let’s dig it out and we can both get on our own ways – you with the filly, me for Mexico.’

  We walked through the brush into the open clearing. The flies, I noticed, had begun to gather around Mosely’s body, walking over his eyes. Was that to be my fate the minute I turned the gold up?

  I hesitated as we entered the campsite, looking around as if I had lost my bearings. ‘It was full dark, Andy,’ I said, playing for time. Waiting for what? No one was coming to help me, it was just me and the killer alone on the plains. There was a strange glaze in Andy’s eyes now, and I knew. No matter what I did he was going to kill me.

  It is a strange feeling that comes over a man when he knows that death is inevitable. Not panic, fear or hysterical pleas to the Lord. Death is there, that is all and there is only the quiet submission to the fact that our life spans are limited. It didn’t matter anymore: let him have the gold. Andy’s own life was certain to be short the wild way he lived. Let him have his moment before the flies covered his eyes. I was too world-weary to care about trivial things like shiny metal any longer.

  ‘The rock over there, Andy. There’s a crease in it. I stuffed the saddlebags in there.’

  ‘Truth, Keogh?’ he asked. He could not kill me until he was sure of finding the gold.

  ‘Have your look,’ I said wearily, and he eased toward the mossy boulder, his Colt trained on me all the way. His hand searched the crevice, found leather strapping. His face became triumphant, somehow boyish again. His
favorite lost toy had been recovered.

  ‘Let me go now, Andy,’ I tried.

  ‘Keogh!’ Andy stood, holding the heavy pouches. ‘Every time I turn around, there you are. You just keep dogging my trail. In Mexico I’d have to keep an eye out for you. You’re always there! I’m sorry,’ he said, not looking a bit sorry as his gun muzzle rose again in my direction.

  The hoofbeats of the approaching horse were sharp and clear and Andy spun to face the rider. I recognized the chestnut instantly and fear rose and lodged in my throat. It was Marly, and Andy Givens’s was going to shoot her down!

  I spun, pawed clumsily at my left-hand gun, brought it up just as Andy Givens squeezed the trigger. My fumbling draw was as slow as a dream response, my thumb across the hammer was slow to ratchet the single-action, but as Andy’s second shot roared out, I trued my aim and the bullet from my Colt hammered a .44 slug into his throat. Andy threw his gun aside, clutched at his terribly bleeding throat with both hands and staggered away across the camp.

  He fell, dead, not five feet from where Bull Mosely lay.

  I was angry. I was furious. Blood seemed to fill my eyes. I stormed toward the chestnut where Marly, wide-eyed, pale and shaken, still sat her saddle.

  ‘Get down from there!’ I shouted, my voice trembling and crazily pitched. And I half-dragged her from the horse. I had her in front of me, her shoulders tightly gripped. I shook her so that her head bobbed back and forth.

  ‘Are you plain crazy, Marly! What are you doing out here. Are you crazy!’

  ‘Yes, I guess so,’ she said in a small voice. ‘And what about you, Corey? Aren’t you a little crazy, too? The things you’ve done.’

  As my fear for her settled slowly, so slowly, my limbs seemed to go weak all at once. It was Marly who supported me as we stumbled, staggered back to the very split boulder where the gold had been concealed. We sat side by side, saying nothing. Marly rested her head on my shoulder and she lightly held my broken right hand. We did not speak. There was nothing left to be said. We did not hear the intruder approach us. I was not aware of his presence until his bass voice said quietly:

  ‘A little falling out among thieves, is that it?’

  I turned my head to see a tall, well set-up man with coppery hair and a silver badge pinned to his blue shirt.

  ‘You could call it that,’ I managed to say.

  ‘You boys have given me a long run. The name’s Frank Copperfield, US marshal out of Denver.’

  ELEVEN

  They have a well-built jail in Denver. All red brick and iron and no one has ever cracked out of this heavily guarded institution, they tell me. Although the food was nothing but compone and bacon, they gave you enough of it to keep you alive. Until your trial, until, if you were charged with murder as I was, they came and took you away to the scaffold hidden in the square behind the buildings.

  Murder was the charge. Killing a man named Miles Sturdevant in Tulip. Tulip wanted me back, but Denver had said that they would do the honors. In Tulip they had half a hundred witnesses to the incident. Two men had broken into a Grange dance, shot dead one of the local citizens through the door during their escape. One of them, most definitely, was the prisoner Corey Keogh. It was a solid hanging charge.

  I tried, honestly, to convince the magistrate that it was Andy Givens who had done the shooting, but he told me that blaming a dead man was the oldest dodge in the books. No one could be found as a witness as to who had actually pulled the trigger. Besides I was, if not the actual gunman, guilty by complicity.

  The days plodded by and my mood stayed dark, I was plain hangdog and cared nothing for the world outside, except for Marly who never had come to visit me. The only benefit of being locked down and fed, given a cot of my own, was that my battered body had begun to heal. Little good it would do me to march healthy up the steps to meet the hangman on the scaffold.

  About four days on I heard the jailer call my name and I rose to my feet to see Eva Pierce escorted by the US Marshal, Frank Copperfield, walking down the flagged corridor toward my cell. Eva had a subdued excitement in her eyes that I could not immediately understand. She half-whispered to me:

  ‘Corey, Marly is waiting with all of her love.’

  ‘She hasn’t been here,’ I growled.

  ‘It’s not allowed – unescorted women visiting a prisoner unless they’re married to them.’ Copperfield explained briefly.

  ‘I just wanted to thank you,’ Eva said. ‘I’ve tried to talk to everybody, explain all that you did.’

  ‘It wasn’t much help, I take it.’

  ‘We don’t know yet, Corey. Not yet. Warren Travers has spoken up for you too.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The mine owner, you remember. He’s told the judge how you recovered his gold shipment for him. He’s even tendered a reward to you.’

  ‘I haven’t got any use for gold where they’re sending me,’ I said. It wasn’t that I was mad at Eva, angry with the world, I was just too tired to care about matters beyond my cell walls. They seemed to have little relevance to my small reality.

  Copperfield took Eva aside for a moment and spoke quietly to her. She nodded, glanced at me and turned to leave. Copperfield’s hand lingered on her shoulder reassuringly. The tall, substantial marshal approached my cell again.

  ‘Keogh,’ he said when we were alone, ‘Eva has told me everything you did for her. I love that woman and intend to marry her. If not for you….’ He paused. ‘I have a question to ask you – have you ever been in Denver before?’

  ‘No, sir. And I’m sorry I ever saw this city.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve never been here, Mr Keogh?’

  I looked at him dumbly through the iron bars, not knowing what he was driving at.

  ‘Why do you ask me?’ I inquired cautiously. Were they trying to stick me with some other crime that had been committed here?

  ‘Maybe you have been – once,’ Copperfield said, looking around. He went on more quietly. ‘Are you sure that you don’t remember the day I deputized you and sent you out after Andy Givens and his gang? In my office alone with me. We swore to keep it secret so that word couldn’t somehow leak out that you were a deputy marshal.’

  I stared at the intent face of the lawman. I frowned; smiled. ‘Oh, that,’ I replied. ‘Well, Copperfield, you said that we were to keep that strictly between ourselves. I didn’t want to break the bond of silence until you authorized it.’

  Copperfield nodded. The corner of his mouth twitched into a partial smile. He briefly touched the hand I was gripping the cold steel bars with, turned and walked away, striding purposefully down the long corridor, boot heels ringing on the stone flagging.

  It was another two days until I stepped out into the brilliant Colorado sunshine, blinked and took a full, free breath of mountain air. Marly was there, waiting.

  Her eyes were brighter than the sky, and the scent of her was more invigorating than the spring breeze rolling down from the Rocky Mountain uplands. She clung to me and cried a little. I stroked her hair, unable to speak for a long while.

  When passing people began to pause and stare, she drew away, holding both of my hands.

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  ‘What now?’ she repeated. ‘Well, Warren Travers has offered you a reward for recovery of the gold. You won’t have to do anything for a while.’

  ‘I can’t just sit and do nothing,’ I said, still clinging to her hand. ‘A man needs to work.’ I turned over my broken right hand. ‘I’m done as a cowboy.’

  ‘I guess you are,’ Marly said. ‘There’s other jobs, Corey. For instance, the stage line has an opening for a line detective – and you have half a dozen good references for the position.’

  ‘Do I?’ I frowned. ‘I don’t know if I’d like that work, Marly. I’d have to think on it.’

  ‘No one said you have to decide today, right now.’ She smiled again and took my elbow, steering me along the bustling street. I slowed her long enough to ask:


  ‘Where are you taking me, Marly?’

  ‘We can’t be late!’ she answered. ‘This is Copperfield and Eva’s wedding day!’

  She started away again, but I stopped her and looking down into her shining eyes, asked, ‘This preacher who’s marrying them, Marly, do you think he would charge much more for a double wedding?’

  By the Same Author

  The Devil’s Canyon

  The Drifter’s Revenge

  West of Tombstone

  On The Wapiti Range

  Rolling Thunder

  The Bounty Killers

  Six Days to Sundown

  Copyright

  © Owen G. Irons 2008

  First published in Great Britain 2008

  This edition 2011

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9790 7 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9791 4 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9792 1 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 8614 7 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Owen G. Irons to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988