Gun (A Spur Western Book 8)

by Matt Chisholm

  ‘I just got here,’ Doolittle said breathlessly. ‘I don’t have to ask what happened.’

  ‘They killed Art Melchum,’ Marvin said. ‘He’s lying over yonder. I reckon old Shreaveley got his too.’

  They turned and walked toward the post-office. When they entered they saw that the lamp had fallen to the floor and its oil was burning. To one side of the safe lay the huddled form of the post-master. The door of the safe hung crazily by one hinge. It was empty. Doolittle went close to Shreaveley and gazed at him. He felt for his pulse and found none.

  ‘Dead as mutton,’ he said.

  They carried Shreaveley outside and laid him on the street. Men were coming from all directions now. A man ran up and said: ‘They busted the jail an’ killed Hughes.’

  Doolittle stood and looked down at Shreaveley. He had never been much in life but a pushing little opportunist. But dead, he reached at something in Doolittle. Three killings in one night. The men who had been here were butchers.

  Inaki Cilveti came up leading the mule. There were men all around now, some in their nightclothes with pants and boots hastily donned. A few had guns in their hands. They all looked shaken.

  There was a horse running through Mex-town. It hit the ford on the run and came heaving up the street. Men parted to let it through. Doolittle saw that the rider was one of his freighters, Tom Dolan. The man’s face was pale and there was horror in his eyes.

  My God, Doolittle thought, what else has happened?

  ‘Charlie,’ Dolan said, ‘Ignacio’s had his throat cut. I went to relieve him and I found him there with his throat cut. They cleaned us outa horses.’

  Doolittle stood, his mind frozen. He knew every one of his men because he was the kind of man who ran a business on a personal basis. He knew their family troubles, when the kids were ailing, when a wife was giving trouble. Men came with their problems to Doolittle. Ignacio had been little more than a kid. Just married. Little Mexican girl from right here in town.

  He pulled himself together. He was an important man in town, he brought a heap of business in here. Men respected him. They would look to him now.

  ‘Marve,’ he said, ‘can’t you raise a posse?’

  Marvin nodded.

  ‘Nobody’ll follow a crew like that in the dark,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a dozen men ready by dawn.’

  ‘You’ll need more than that if you can get them,’ Doolittle told him. ‘With this kind. They must be kill-crazy. Tom, you make arrangements about Ignacio. Tell his wife. You know.’

  ‘What you goin’ to do, Charlie?’ Dolan asked. He knew his boss.

  ‘I’m going after this gang.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Like a fox. If this is the bunch that held up the stage, why they’re expert. We couldn’t find their sign a-tall. Not even Cusie Ben could do that. So I’m goin’ to get ’em in sight and keep ’em in sight.’

  Vince Marvin said: ‘Don’t do it, Charlie. We don’t want any more dead.’

  ‘I shan’t be dead, Marve,’ Doolittle said steadily. ‘You can have my word on that.’

  He looked at the massive mean-eyed Kentucky mule and he thought: That animal could run for a week. I never saw an animal travel like it. Damned if I don’t take him along. He’d wear down any horse living,

  ‘Inaki,’ he said to the Basque, ‘take that contraption off that ugly-looking crittur an’ slap a saddle on him.’

  The Basque didn’t understand. He spread his hands and looked around for an explanation.

  Dolan said: ‘Aw, hell,’ dismounted and unsaddled his horse. A few minutes later, Doolittle was mounted and Albert was resenting it.

  A voice said: ‘You’ll want supplies, Mr. Doolittle.’

  Doolittle turned and saw Mangan Carson, the trader and father of the target of his hopeless passion.

  ‘Sure will.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Carson hurried away. Doolittle lifted his eyes to the upper window of the store and saw a head and shoulders silhouetted against the light and knew that it was Lydia.

  Men were carrying Shreaveley away on the post-office door. Vince Marvin was collecting names for the posse. Every man to report at his saloon an hour before dawn with horse, rifle and belt-gun. Marvin would provide supplies and extra ammunition out of his own pocket. If the county wouldn’t pay them, he would. Marvin was quietly mad. The men were eager now to offer their services. By dawn, he knew full well, it would have cooled somewhat. It was no-never-mind. If he had to go alone, he’d keep on till he came up with those men who had killed in his town. He felt he should be riding with Charlie Doolittle.

  Mangan Carson came back with the supplies in a gunnysack. Doolittle hung it from his saddlehorn and then he was ready.

  He looked up at the window again. He knew it was open now, for he saw the curtain flutter a little in the light breeze. He thought he saw her raise a hand to him, but he could have been mistaken, for a man sees what he wants to see.

  Her father, the meanest man in town, was saying: ‘God go with you, Mr. Doolittle.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll need him at that,’ Doolittle said and lifted the lines of the ornery mule. Albert lifted his head, brayed, kicked his heels at the innocent citizenry and ambled off down the street. Doolittle felt like some Don Quixote, daring and foolish all at the same time. He swung the mule around the end of the post-office and plunged into the darkness. A moment later, he was scraping through the brush under the trees and hitting the flat beyond. He wondered what awaited him far out in the moonlit country ahead of him. Death maybe or, worse feared, a crippling. He wondered why he was being such a damned fool. He had a profitable and flourishing business, the country was opening up and the years ahead of him looked good. It was something to stay alive for. He concluded that most men were fools and he was a bigger fool than most.

  He crossed the Tucson trail and headed for the malpais and when he reached the land of rock and aridity and stopped again to discover that he could no longer hear the riders to the front of him. He hesitated to go ahead, for he knew that the mule’s iron hoofs would ring like bells on the rock ahead. They would be able to hear him a mile off. He waited for five minutes and then he told himself that, if he did not go ahead, he might lose them altogether and the whole purpose of his being out on this dangerous night would have lost its reason.

  He went ahead gingerly, walking the mule, stopping and listening every hundred yards or so.

  Finally, he heard the chink of a hoof and rock and knew that it came from the stamp of a halted horse. He knew the men were ahead of him. The mule knew they were there too. He stood still, his head up and his ears forward. As good as a watchdog was Albert.

  Doolittle made a guess at why they had halted. The box with the gold would be awkward to carry on a horse. They were opening the box and distributing the gold among themselves. Then maybe they would scatter to the four winds. No mind, he would trail the one he could. On that he was determined.

  After a while, he heard some horses get on the move. A bunch of them moved off to the east, going at a fast clip. He heard their hoofbeats die away into the distance as they rode off the malpais and onto the sand of the desert.

  He would have followed them, but even as he was urging Albert forward, he heard the trumpet of a horse ahead of him. At once he drew rein again and listened.

  At once he knew that not all the riders had gone off east.

  There was still a number of men ahead of him. He heard them go south. The men who had stopped the stage and taken the girl had gone in the same direction. Maybe without much reason, but that convinced him that if was these men he should follow.

  He started off again.

  Albert, for some reason known only to himself, now brayed loudly. Doolittle cursed and sweated and prayed that the sound had been drowned for the men he followed by the sound of their own hoofbeats.

  When he stopped to listen again, he heard only the faint drum of briskly trotting horses and knew that they had left the malpais
and were now headed south through the cactus country. He sent Albert forward at a quick walk.

  As he approached the end of the malpais, a great pile of rocks reared themselves up darkly to his left, somber and threatening in the ghostly light of the moon. Beyond he could see the pale sweep of the desert. The dust of the men ahead of him was still on the air.

  He came to within thirty feet of the edge of the rock upon which the mule walked when the shot came.

  It was the nearest miss he had ever experienced in his life and it nearly scared him out of his skin. It struck the front of the saddle and the big mule staggered a little. For a second, Doolittle thought the animal was hit and despair exploded in him. But he was a slowish man whose mind worked quickly in an emergency.

  In that first fraction of a second, he knew that if a man could come that close with a slug with his first shot, the chances were the second would split his brisket or scatter his few brains over the hard surface of the rock.

  Without any more ado, he clutched at himself and gave a cry of alarm and pain that would have done justice to a play-actor treading the boards of a theater, let himself slide from the saddle and hit the rock with his gun in his hand.

  Albert obligingly stepped forward a few paces and brayed with hauteur.

  Doolittle lay on his left side, facing the rocks, the gun held under the cover of his coat. He lay very still and he strained his eyes and ears.

  His ears told him that the man who had shot at him was coming down from the rocks. He heard the scrabble of small rocks and then there came the slow steady tramp of booted feet, the light jangle of spurs.

  Charlie Doolittle had never felt his nerves tighter in all his life. They seemed to be on the verge of screaming.

  He could picture the action of the next minute or two to himself. The man had a rifle and he could shoot a damn sight further than Doolittle could with his Colt gun. Therefore, the man might halt a good way off to give the finishing shot. Which he would do if he knew his business.

  His sharp eyes caught the shadowy figure of the man. His high-crowned hat showed against the moon-sky. He came on, a faceless forbidding figure of darkness. The moonlight glittered dully on the barrel of his carbine.

  Closer ... closer...

  Doolittle found that he was holding his breath till he was ready to burst.

  The man halted.

  Doolittle pulled the gun from under his coat. The foresight caught in the cloth and slowed him. He cocked the gun and thrust it out straight at the end of his arm. He had the dark figure in line.

  The man raised his carbine and Doolittle fired.

  As soon as he triggered, he moved, bending his long legs, getting his big feet under him and shooting himself forward as the shot came. He heard it spaaang on rock within inches of him and go whining away into the night. He had his gun cocked. He heaved air into his starved lungs and heard the man levering for another shot. He cocked the Colt and fired again.

  He seemed to hear his bullet strike. It was the sweetest sound he could have heard.

  The man did a half-turn with an extraordinary slowness after the initial burst of violent action. His rifle clattered down. He hit the rock and rolled a little, making a sound like ‘Aaaah’ softly as though through his clenched teeth.

  Doolittle gritted his own teeth, rose to one knee and fired again.

  The man jerked, kicking as though in a wild frenzy several times and lay still.

  Doolittle rose to his feet and walked slowly forward.

  He turned the man over with a toe because he didn’t want to touch him. He saw the lean, unshaven face; the staring eyes. The hat had fallen off and he saw that one of his bullets had taken the man high in the head. His other bullet must have taken him under the rib cage to the right. The sight was gruesome and sickening. It sickened Doolittle because it was the first man he had ever killed.

  He felt very very tired. He had never felt more tired. Every ounce of strength had been drained from him. It was a strange sensation standing there, knowing you had taken a man’s life. The fact that he had tried to take yours didn’t come into the consideration. Yet, at the same time, there was no feeling, no conscious remorse. It was his body that reacted. He started to shake like the leaf of an aspen. He shook so much that he had to sit down beside the corpse in the moonlight, waiting for some feeling to return.

  Feeling came back to him with the realization that he was still in acute physical danger.

  The men ahead had probably heard the shot. They could be returning now.

  Then he thought of the man’s horse. A riding man didn’t leave a horse tied to die of thirst or starvation. He went over to Albert and led him toward the rocks and for once the mule behaved himself. He tied the animal in the rocks and searched for the dead man’s horse. It didn’t take him long to find it, for it whinnied and he homed on the sound.

  When he had stripped saddle and bridle from the animal, he considered for a moment the possibility of his taking the horse along with him as a spare, but he rejected the idea and sent the horse scampering away into the night. It might home on some location known to it, it might take up with the wild ones.

  Doolittle rode to the edge of the malpais and looked for the sign of the retreating riders. He failed to find it. That puzzled him. Keeping to the rock so that he would leave no sign at this stage himself, he rode back and forth, searching. He found nothing.

  There was only one answer to that. Somebody had wiped out their tracks. Doolittle may have been a freighter and not basically a man of the wild places. He liked running a solid business and he liked things nice. But he was also a man of iron determination and he hated to be beaten. Added to that he did not possess only business acumen, he was pretty smart all around, in spite of his appearance of slowness. He sat the mule and thought his way through his problem.

  He was in danger if the raiders came back the way they had come. He knew also that if they were in a hurry to get away with the gold, they couldn’t waste too much time wiping out sign.

  So he rode east along the edge of the malpais and then, right near the rocks from which he had been shot at, he circled out into the desert. It wasn’t going to be easy to find sign in the moonlight, but he was going to have a damn good try at it.

  His sense of direction was not too bad and after he had circled for about a mile, he reckoned he was about due north of the spot where he reckoned the raiders had left the malpais for the desert.

  He found the sign with an ease that surprised him. He couldn’t believe his luck. He lifted the lines of the mule and followed it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Cusie Ben lay back against the rock, his hat over his eyes and his mind floating in that pleasant land between sleep and wakefulness. In such a state, his mind was always at its best. In it, he had almost total recall. Dreamily, he was living again every inch of the way he had come with Sam Spur and the others.

  Then, suddenly, he had it.

  A beatific smile spread over his black and, it must be admitted, ugly face.

  He sat up and pushed his battered hat onto the back of his head.

  ‘Wa-al, I’ll be dogged,’ he said.

  The mule flicked its ears and gazed at him sadly, patiently waiting, not enjoying the heat. Ben knew he wanted water. He wasn’t the only one. He rose to his feet, hitched his pants with an air of fine finality and stepped leisurely into the saddle. He trotted the mule north, going back along the tracks he and his party had made. He covered a couple of miles before he stopped.

  He was now in a small, very shallow valley. Most of the center of it, maybe spreading for several hundred yards, was covered with tiny rocks. He rode down this and then, halfway down it, he dropped from the saddle, ground-hitched and walked slowly to the west. Within ten patient minutes he found what he wanted. In a small patch of dust, he found the mark of the edge of an iron horse-shoe. No more. He worked his way further west, climbed the side of the valley and there were the tracks of several horses. He chuckled to himself an
d rubbed his hands with satisfaction. He hated to think there was a man around who could fool him. Why, Spur might even lose faith in him and that would hurt his pride.

  He walked back to his mount and rode into the west. He rode steadily with two major hold-ups when he came to spots chosen by the tracker ahead of him to lose sign. But each time he found it again. Not long after that, he was climbing steeply, working his way through stunted timber. Then, after he had found water and given both himself and the mule a good drink, he came on the cabin.

  He approached the place with great caution, although his instinct told him that it was not occupied. When he finally entered it, he found that men had been there a short while before. He searched it thoroughly, ate some canned tomatoes he found there and was greatly refreshed by them after his hot ride and found a small cambric handkerchief among the blankets of one of the bunks. Then he was sure the girl had been there. He was on the right tracks.

  Encouraged by his success and knowing that he still had a few hours of daylight ahead of him, he remounted and headed on west. During the rest of his ride that day, he found that the sign he was following was being concealed with greater skill than before. He reckoned another tracker had taken over. These boys really meant to hide their tracks this time and were taking their time about it.

  It was only toward dark that he realized that he was riding back in the direction of town.

  It seemed crazy and improbable, but it was true. By night, he came to water and lost them altogether. He crossed the creek, went out of the sound of the water, for nothing could dull a man’s senses more than flowing water, and made camp. Tomorrow, he would find those sonsabitches and he’d show ’em.

  His last thought before he fell into a light and dreamless sleep was for Sam Spur, somewhere off there in the wilderness, eating his heart out for that girl, blaming himself.

  Chapter Twelve

  Chance, it is said, is a fine thing or would be. Maybe that’s true sometimes. Chance played a large part in Spur’s movements after he had ridden away from the others with the Kid in tow.