Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  Utter took off his gloves and slapped them together, then said: “Well, ain’t that a piece of bad news.” Then he looked at John Henry Cole and said: “We’re looking for a lady. Don’t suppose you’ve seen a woman about?”

  “Saw no woman,” Cole said before Harve or Teddy Green could say anything. “Why are you looking for her?”

  Utter looked at Cole with his dark, buggy eyes, the lids half closed, as though he were already tired of the conversation. “That’d be none of your business, mister.”

  “You’re the man who buried Hickok,” Cole stated.

  He blinked. “You heard of me, huh?”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Then, if you know anything, you know I’m a serious man. If you know about this woman I’m looking for … her name’d be Ella Devereaux … then you’d best tell me about it. I find out otherwise, me and my men here might just come looking for you boys.”

  “You don’t want to come looking for me,” Teddy Green said in his flat voice that was as cold as iron.

  “Oh, you don’t believe so, eh?” Utter replied.

  “You don’t want to come looking for me, mister,” Teddy Green repeated. “You want to track down women to hang them, you go ahead. Maybe that’s your speed, but you don’t ever want to come looking for me.”

  Some of the riders visibly shifted their weight, but not Colorado Charley Utter—he was a man with too much bulk to shift easily. He tapped his gloves in one hand and measured Teddy Green, measured his speech and the level empty gaze.

  “You know why I’m after her, then,” Utter said at last. “I find out you boys know the whereabouts of this woman I’m after, I won’t forget that.”

  “We don’t know anything about this woman,” Cole said, making sure to cut off Teddy Green’s challenge to the man. Getting into a shoot-out wasn’t going to serve anyone’s purpose, especially not theirs, considering they were outgunned three to one.

  Utter tugged on his gloves, took up his reins, and turned his horse back in the direction they’d come and rode out. The other riders followed, slapping the ends of their reins over the flanks of their mounts, throwing up clods of dirt as they peeled up the ridge.

  “Maybe I should have killed that man here and now,” Teddy Green said. “Might have saved us all some future troubles.”

  “Maybe so,” Cole said. “But a wise man has to pick and choose his place and time and this was neither the place nor the time.”

  Green shifted his gaze from the distant riders. “We’ll meet those men again, John Henry. And when we do, we’ll have to kill or be killed.”

  “I’ve already counted on it, Mister Green, but maybe next time we’ll have the odds a little more in our favor.”

  “What now?” Harve said. “We going to ride or are we just going to stand out here and watch it rain and talk about shooting guns?”

  “I’m with you, Mister Ledbettor,” Teddy Green said. “We’re just burning daylight, standing around here.”

  “Well, we might find us a way to narrow down just exactly where Ella and Tom Feathers are headed,” Cole said.

  They both looked at him and Green said: “How?”

  * * * * *

  They rode back into Ogallala and stopped in front of the city marshal’s office. Bittercreek Newcomb was sitting inside, his feet in a pan of hot water. He looked up when they walked in, wide-eyed and ruddy-faced. He was already working up a sweat at just the sight of them.

  “What the hell you yahoos doing back here?” he shouted.

  “Keep your feet in that pan,” Harve said. “Or I’ll pull this hog-leg and shoot you in both of them wrinkled dogs.”

  Newcomb grimaced at the threat.

  Cole told him about finding Ella Mims’s aunt and Jake Feathers and his men.

  Newcomb got a sour look on his face. “Cut off their ears?”

  Harve started to go into detail about Gypsy Davy and his penchant for human ears, but Cole stopped him before he could get windy. “The man who killed them,” Cole said, “is someone we need to find before he finds Ella Mims and Tom Feathers. The old man’s dying word when we asked him the direction they were headed was ‘Gonzales’. You want to tell us what that means?”

  Bittercreek looked at the three of them like they were rotting buffalo hides some fool had dropped off in his office as a practical joke. “Well, even if I did, you think I’d give two shits about you boys finding them, or anybody else, for that matter?” His gaze was fixed stonily on Teddy Green. “You know how hard my daughter cried when I told her you killed her husband? You know what my baby’s tears felt like running over my hands as I tried to wipe them from her eyes? You got any idea how much she loved that man?”

  “This ain’t about that,” Cole said. “Maybe next time she will have better judgment in men and won’t marry a killing rapist.”

  Newcomb’s gaze shifted to Cole with as much vehemence as it had held for Green. “I aim to kill you boys, just thought you ought to know.”

  “Go ahead and shoot him in the feet, Harve,” Cole said.

  “Hell, yes!” Harve said, and pulled his Buntline Special. “When I finish with you, you’ll have to crawl for your supper and sit to take a piss.”

  “Hold on now!” Newcomb cried.

  “Tell me what you know about this Gonzales,” Cole said.

  Bittercreek grumbled for a moment, then saw that Harve would have no trouble crippling him by shooting him in the feet. Convinced, he told them that he’d seen Feathers and Ella passing through town three days before on the south road with luggage tied to the back of Tom Feathers’s hack. “Jake owned a cattle spread in Gonzales, Texas,” Bittercreek said. “That’s all I know about it.”

  “That road they took, where’s it lead?” Harve asked, still aiming his long iron at the feet of Bittercreek Newcomb.

  “Take you all the way to the god-damn’ Gulf of Mexico, I reckon, if you stayed on it long enough.”

  “Kansas, then across the Oklahoma panhandle, and on into Texas,” Teddy Green said. “We better get after them.”

  “They ain’t alone,” Newcomb said. “Feathers has got a nigger hand of his with them … one who can shoot in the dark.”

  Harve blinked. “Nigger that shoots in the dark?”

  “That ’un can,” Bittercreek said. “The old man hired him special, had him brought up here from the Nations ’cause of his reputation. Fact is, I’m the one who told Jake about that nigger … how he can see in the dark good enough to shoot a man at a hundred yards. You give him daylight, he’ll kill you from a mile out with his buffler gun.”

  “That doesn’t mean spit to me,” Teddy Green said, already turning to leave.

  “Maybe that nigger will shoot you in the dark and save me the trouble,” Newcomb said. That was when Teddy Green came around in one forceful motion and struck the lawman hard across the cheek bone, knocking him out of the chair and his feet out of the water pan. “You want to shoot me, get to it, you fat tub of guts, or keep your mouth shut.”

  That was all there was to it. Bittercreek Newcomb didn’t say another word as they turned and walked out of his office.

  “We have to look at it this way,” Cole said as they walked their rented horses back to the livery. “If Feathers has got an extra man with him who can shoot, it can’t hurt if Gypsy Davy or Charley Utter catches up with them before we do.”

  Harve chimed in by saying: “I knew a trick shot in Fresno who shot glass balls off his wife’s head while wearing a blindfold.”

  “That’s damned risky business on her part,” Teddy Green said.

  Harve laughed and said: “No, he wasn’t wearing the blindfold … she was.”

  It broke the mood somewhat, Harve and his stories. They needed to buy horses and asked the owner of the livery if he had any for sale. He clapped his hands and said: “I do.”

&
nbsp; They bought three of his best, which were of average horseflesh, but they’d have to do.

  “You think these mounts will hold up under a hard ride?” Teddy Green said as they saddled up. The horses had cost them $20 each, the saddles $40.

  “Only one way to find out,” Cole said.

  They rode until dark and made a dry camp by a branch of the Platte. A meal of beans and river water coffee, a quick shuck, and a pull from Harve’s whiskey flask to ward off the chill, and they found themselves in their bedrolls, staring up at a half moon behind shifting silvery clouds. As he lay there watching the big emptiness overhead, Cole kept thinking about the surname Utter had given Ella—Devereaux. The more he learned about her, the more he understood how little he knew.

  Chapter Twelve

  They rode three days south into Kansas. One thing about Kansas is that there’s not much to take up your attention, just endless seas of prairie grass and hardly any trees. If you wanted to hang a man in Kansas, you’d be hard pressed.

  “This is a godless place,” Teddy Green said after lonely hours and days of riding and seeing little more than an occasional soddy. “What would possess a man to bring his family way out here?”

  “Free land,” Cole said.

  “It’s not hard to see why it’s free,” Green said. “Who’d want it?”

  Harve rode along, whistling happily until he ran out of bug juice. “Need to stop and buy some supplies,” he said, holding forth the empty flask, trying to shake out the last drops.

  They rode on. Eventually they came to a burg called Sweet Jesus—it was painted on a board a hundred yards from the nearest set of raw lumber buildings. Cole counted four in all.

  “It ain’t hard to see how it got its name,” Harve said as they rode past the sign. “The first feller probably stopped here and said … ‘Sweet Jesus, I can’t go no farther! And, Sweet Jesus, there just ain’t no reason to.’”

  Among the buildings there was a whiskey den, a mercantile, a restaurant, and a blacksmith—everything a prairie town needed to survive, it would seem. Harve wanted to go straight to the whiskey den, but Cole suggested they might do well to have a meal at the restaurant, that all the hardtack and beans they’d eaten on the trail were getting plenty tiresome.

  “Well, I’ll meet you boys at the hog house,” Harve said. “I’ve got to warsh my throat.”

  Teddy Green and Cole rode over to the restaurant while Harve tied up in front of a place called Big Mary’s. They went inside and grabbed chairs at a table near the window. Cole had a need to sit by windows where the light was good and he could observe the street—it was an old habit from his days as a lawman, and also from his days while on the dodge.

  They sat there a long time without anyone taking notice, even though they were the only patrons. Then finally a man came out of a back room, wiping his hands on a greasy apron. He had a head full of thick hair and was as big around as he was tall and, when he saw them, he came right over.

  “’Scusa,” he said. “I’m in the back and don’t hear you gentlemen come in.”

  He had the same accent as Bill Cody’s wife—Italian.

  “Two plates of grub,” Teddy Green said. “Make it steak, if you got it, and no beans!”

  “Sì, sì, signore. I fix them right up for you.”

  “Wonder how it is a man comes all the way across the wide ocean to end up out here on this godless frontier?” Teddy Green said. “Think of all the places a man could end up. This place doesn’t even seem like it would be on the list.”

  “Maybe he was trying to get to California or Oregon and just couldn’t go no farther, like Harve said.”

  Teddy Green reached in his pocket, took out his watch, and wound it. He checked the time, then put it away again.

  “You catch the name Colorado Charley used when he spoke of Ella?” he said.

  “Yeah, Devereaux,” Cole said. “Was that her maiden name before she married you?”

  “No, it was Simpson, leastways that’s what she told me at the time.”

  “Then she’s using an alias,” Cole said.

  “Sounds like.”

  “You as concerned about her as I am?”

  Green looked at Cole for a long hard moment. “You forgetting who it was came to you for help in the first place?” he said.

  “No, I haven’t forgotten.”

  They ate their steaks in silence. They gnawed the meat off the bones as if they were pilgrims just landed, which in a sense they were, only instead of an ocean behind them, they were in a sea of grass.

  Cole was rolling a shuck when he saw something he didn’t believe. It was a naked man riding a flea-bitten mule down the center of the town. Naked, that was, except for his hat, a pistol belt and a revolver, and his boots.

  Teddy Green saw him, too.

  “I thought I’d seen everything,” he said. “I was wrong.”

  Cole called the waiter over and asked him who the man was.

  His eyes got big and he said: “Oh, that’s Signore Allison.”

  “Clay Allison?”

  “Sì, that’s Signore Allison. Sometimes he comes to town like that.”

  Cole looked at Teddy Green. “The last I heard Clay Allison was in New Mexico, married, with a wife and several children.”

  “Last I heard he was in jail in El Paso,” Teddy Green said. “Somebody ought to go tell him to put some clothes on before he’s spotted by a decent woman.”

  “Be my guest,” Cole said.

  Green looked at Cole in that hard flat stare of his. “Maybe I just will.”

  “Let it go, Teddy. Why risk getting killed because the man’s a fool?”

  “Doesn’t this place have any law?” Teddy Green asked the waiter.

  He nodded sadly. “Sì. We got Signore Redbird, but he’s asleep a lot or drunk and asleep. Sometimes he’s a fishing in the river, too.”

  “Where’s his office?” Cole asked.

  “Over there.” He pointed toward Big Mary’s, the saloon Harve had gone into to drink his lunch.

  They found Ned Redbird stretched out on the pool table, asleep. Harve was chatting with a woman in a red dress in a far corner near the piano and paid little attention to either Clay Allison, who stood along the bar with his bare buttocks sticking out like loaves of unbaked bread, or Cole and Teddy Green when they came in.

  Teddy Green shook Ned Redbird awake. He sat up, scratching his eyes, and said: “Who are you and why are you disturbing my sleep?”

  Teddy Green pointed toward the naked gunfighter. “Is it your custom to allow lewdness in public?”

  Ned Redbird looked at Clay Allison, then back at Teddy Green. “Why, hell, that’s Clay Allison. What’m I supposed to do? That man’s killed more people than the pox. You think I’m going to tell him he has to dress up to come into my town?”

  “You’re the law, aren’t you?” Teddy Green said.

  “Am the law, but that don’t mean I got to die being it. Besides, what’s the harm? He ain’t shooting or stabbing nobody. Wake me up if he starts shooting or stabbing somebody.” Ned Redbird stretched back out on the pool table.

  “Why? Does that mean you’ll go arrest him if he starts killing folks?” Teddy Green said.

  Ned Redbird opened one eye and peered disdainfully at the Ranger. “No, it just means that, if he starts stabbing and shooting people, I want to get on down the road before he stabs or shoots me.”

  Teddy Green uttered an oath, then looked at Cole and said: “That is just plain indecent.”

  “Let it go,” Cole warned him again. “You see anybody complaining except you?”

  The woman Harve was talking to laughed suddenly and Cole saw Clay Allison look in their direction.

  “Naomi, you damn’ cheating bitch!” Allison bellowed.

  “That’s it,” Teddy Green said, and crossed the
room to where Allison stood against the bar.

  “Mister, you are a damnation to look at. Why don’t you go put some clothes on like a decent man?”

  Clay Allison drew his head back sharply as though he’d ducked a punch. He blinked, probably unaccustomed to having anyone say anything to him about his appearance or manner. Cole eased his way into position to shoot Allison if he went for his pistol. If he did go for his gun, some of them might die.

  Seeing for the first time Clay Allison’s state of affairs, Harve cawed from the table: “What’s that you say, you bare-assed son-of-a-bitch?”

  Allison’s gaze shifted from Teddy Green to Harve. Cole’s movement in taking up a position on him also caught his attention. Suddenly he looked like a bad dog surrounded by three other bad dogs. Which one to fight? That may have been what was going through his mind.

  “Let it go, Clay,” Cole said. “You pull your iron, one of us is going to kill you.”

  His gaze came to rest fully on Cole, at least what he could see of him, standing where he was, where the light was bad and off to his left.

  Harve had moved away from the table where the woman seemed to shrink herself as small as she could. There wasn’t a back door and no place to run except past Clay Allison, so she stayed where she was.

  “That,” he bellowed, “is my god-damn’ woman sitting with that one-armed son-of-a-bitch, and I don’t allow no man to sit with my woman, especially one-armed sons-of-bitches!”

  “He didn’t know,” Cole said. “He does now.”

  Harve was itching to pull his hog-leg and let fly, but Cole knew Allison would probably kill him before either Teddy Green or he could shoot the man down.

  “Ease off, Harve,” Cole said.

  Teddy Green and the gunfighter were no more than three feet apart. Cole kept waiting for one of them to make a move, hoping the whole time that Clay Allison would see he was in a delicate situation.

  “Three against one, Clay,” Cole said. “Even a blind man can see those are poor odds. Why die like this, naked in a saloon? Think how your wife and kids would feel, hearing the news.”