Lassiter 4

by Peter McCurtin

  McCain turned the gun on Lassiter. Lassiter held his gun steady, level with his side. The Irishman seemed to have forgotten where he was. When he remembered he howled with crazy laughter and started running again. The laughing got wilder when he saw the guard Burgess aiming a rifle at him from the porch of the last house in the row. Burgess fired and missed. McCain didn’t miss. There were three bullets left in McCain’s gun, and he put them all in the guard’s head.

  Considering the kind of guard Burgess was, Lassiter thought that was fair enough. Running silently through the truck gardens behind the prison-built houses, Lassiter and the Irishman reached the railroad tracks. They threw themselves down on the graveled embankment and fought to bring their breathing under control

  “Some fun!” were McCain’s first words when he had wind enough to speak.

  Lassiter knew that he was tied in with a madman. He realized that right around the time McCain had caved in the old Scotchman’s skull. The way McCain had killed the warden was another thing. Lassiter could see killing the warden. The difference was, if he wanted to kill the warden or any other man, he would have done it himself. He wouldn’t give the job to a trained ape like the half-breed. And he wouldn’t put his gun on a little boy.

  “Yeah, it’s real funny,” he said.

  The half-breed came lumbering through the half light, big as a grizzly, long-armed as an ape, making as much noise as three men. He threw himself down beside them. The wind whistling in his barrel chest sounded like the valves of a broken harmonium. What he said to the Irishman was in bastard French. Big as he was, he was afraid of McCain.

  McCain said in English, “You learn slowly, Baptiste. Next time you go against my orders I’ll leave you. Or I’ll kill you. You get that, do you?”

  Baptiste didn’t like to be told off in front of Lassiter. Maybe he was surly or maybe that was the way he usually spoke.

  “Sure I got him,” he said.

  From there, with the jail whistle still splitting the night, it was just a fast run down the tracks, then a gravel-scattering slide down the embankment beside the iron bridge across the creek. Lassiter could sense the men and horses in there in the darkness. No guns were cocked: the guns were already cocked, waiting for them—if they were the wrong people.

  “Papineau,” a voice called out, a French accented voice. The password.

  “Mackenzie,” the Irishman said. The countersign.

  The creek was shallow, the water in it cold as ice, the darkness thick and smelling of iron rust from the bridge overhead. The water ran over the tops of Lassiter’s prison boots, numbing his feet instantly. What in sweet Jesus, he thought suddenly, was he doing, in a red and black jail-suit, with a battered face and frozen feet, standing ankle-deep in a half-frozen creek under a railroad bridge somewhere outside the town of Trail, British Columbia? In Canada. Thousands of miles from El Paso, Texas, his favorite town in the whole world. It was a good question.

  Some light filtered into the darkness under the bridge. Lassiter made out three men on horses, then other riderless horses. The horses were quiet, well trained, bigger than the animals he was used to.

  The first voice to hail them spoke again. Lassiter could see the shape of the man who spoke, not his face. The shape was small, and it didn’t sit well in the saddle on the big horse. The voice was precise, careful, suspicious. It asked the Irishman, “Is this the American gunman, Bates?”

  McCain chuckled. “Bates is dead. I brought you somebody better than Bates. My word on it, Emile. Emile Roberge say hello to Harvey McCall.”

  “The name is Lassiter,” Lassiter said.

  “All right, let’s move,” McCain said before the suspicious Frenchman had time to ask about the name change. “They’ll have the bloodhounds out in a minute. Not to mention the good Colonel Cameron and his militiamen.”

  The horse they gave Lassiter was a fine animal. He couldn’t see the clothes they gave him, but the horse was easy moving and spirited. He felt better after he dropped the prison duds in the creek, changed into the new gear, and climbed into the saddle. The saddle bothered him a bit at first, not because it gave him problems but because he wasn’t used to it. It was English modified to Canadian, the pad type without the horn, and he sure as hell would hate to do a day’s work rounding up strays in a saddle like that.

  Out of the creek, with Emile Roberge, the careful Canuck out in front, they rode along the right of way. McCain and the half-breed rode close to Lassiter. The other two men—neither of them had said a word—rode behind. They were watching him, Lassiter knew. They might even be watching the Irishman.

  Lassiter said at last, after they left the railroad and got on to a narrow trail hemmed in on both sides with stunted pines, “I don’t suppose your friends would consider taking some cash for this horse and trusting me for the rest?”

  McCain hadn’t heard a better joke for ages. “Not if you were prepared to pay a thousand in gold,” he said. “You might as well make up your mind—what is it, is it Lassiter? You’re in this thing, like it or not. Right to the end or most of the way anyhow.”

  Lassiter, not expecting to be told, asked where they were headed.

  McCain was well out of jail. He could have laughed like a loon. From old habit he gave the convict’s silent, chest-heaving laugh. Out of jail it didn’t sound right and there was something sad, something mad in it, and something vicious.

  “Patience, man,” he said. “The world’s been spinning for a long time. It’ll go on turning after we’re gone.”

  Lassiter didn’t see what that had to do with it. Every jailhouse philosopher he’d ever met had something to say about the world spinning through the ages, the age of rocks, and the frost on the pumpkin.

  The trees cleared, and they were out on the spongy Canadian prairie, green and purple and still waterlogged from the winter snows.

  McCain knew what Lassiter was thinking. “There’s big money to be made,” he said. “Even if we don’t bring it off. Which, of course, we will. Since our hearts are pure and our cause is just.”

  Lassiter craved a cigarette and a drink, more than one drink, more than two drinks. The slimy boiled fish they’d had for supper kept coming back into his throat.

  “You mentioned money?” he said.

  “The root and plenty of it,” the Irishman declared. “Hey, Lassiter,” he said next. “What about that boy back there. You threatened to shoot me. Would you have? If you could have, I mean? Before I killed you, I mean, would you have tried?”

  Lassiter had been thinking about it. He said, not a bit mean about it, just truthful: “I’d have done it, Mac. Why’d you want to kill that boy? The Scotchman, too, while we’re on it?”

  They were climbing into the hills through wild country cold and wet, crisscrossed with creeks, choked with pines, scattered and divided by rocks.

  McCain said, “I had to kill Scotty, the poor bastard. After all those years in prison he didn’t have a lick of sense left. Twenty years ago he got thirty years for passing queer money. They never gave him a parole because he became too useful. The only thing poor Scotty wanted was revenge. You saw the way he beat that cell block guard?”

  Lassiter kept his mouth shut.

  “Sure I killed Scotty,” McCain said, riding easy, holding the reins with one hand, waving the other like a dago fruit peddler. “A man like Scotty is too wild to be trusted. Too old and crazy.”

  “He got you out,” Lassiter said, not really arguing any more. Talking to McCain was something he was tired of.

  The Irishman said, “Look, Lassiter, he was too old to take along, and I couldn’t leave him behind. They’d hang him sure, if I did that. Killing him was the least I could do.”

  Lassiter, dry-mouthed, chewed his tongue for a while. After the talk about the Scotchman, what could he say about the women, the boy the Irishman had tried to kill.

  McCain said it for him. “In the revolution business, brother, you’ve got to be ruthless. You have to kill because sometimes killin
g is necessary. Women and children, it’s all the same. When it isn’t, it makes you feel better. That’s the awful truth of it: it makes you feel better. Therefore, it’s necessary.”

  Therefore was one of those words that Lassiter never used and didn’t feel the need to. “Therefore,” he said. “Therefore,” he said to the Irishman, getting used to the word—”you smell. You smell and you stink!”

  The anger in him went away, some of it anyway. He was tired and on a trail he didn’t like, with a bunch of people he didn’t know, in a place he didn’t especially want to be.

  McCain let out a big breath of used air, and there was no offense in his voice when he spoke. He was older than Lassiter and meaner, not tougher. He said, “Fighting for freedom is a dirty business, Lassiter. And there’s no easy way.”

  The Irishman’s tone was quiet, almost sad.

  Moving his horse, Lassiter decided Pierce McCain was a double-dyed son of a bitch.

  Chapter Four

  They traveled steadily through the night, climbing into thickly timbered hills, following an old military road grown over with grass and weeds and washed away in places. There were guards with rifles spaced out at one-mile intervals. They stopped when challenged, and then rode on until they were stopped again. The password and countersign were repeated monotonously.

  Sometime in the middle of the night they stopped at a farmhouse and drank scalding coffee while the bush-bearded farmer and his three hulking sons switched horses. By the time the sky turned streaky, they had come thirty miles from the town of Trail.

  McCain hadn’t spoken a word for hours. An old night-rider, he rode slouched and dozing in the saddle.

  The road went through a high narrow pass and dipped down into a wide valley. The gray morning light thinned out, and up ahead about two miles away Lassiter saw what looked like a fort.

  “There it is,” McCain said. “Fort Liberté.” The Irishman gave the same silent laugh. “It used to be called Fort Albert after the Queen’s dear departed husband. They built it about thirty years ago when the Indians hereabouts were kicking up a fuss. It’s been abandoned for years.”

  “Thanks for the tour,” Lassiter answered, more interested in breakfast than the military history of British Columbia. Cook fires drifted up into the still cold air, and he thought he could smell ham steaks frying, but with a mile still to go he knew it had to be his imagination.

  The sun coming up seemed to make the Irishman chatty again. “The old fort’s not what it used to be, but we’re kind of proud of it—since it’s the only one we’ve got.”

  Lassiter was tired, cold, hungry, irritable. Men who talked too much always bothered him. Men who talked too much early in the morning were worse than a dose of crabs.

  “What’s all this ‘we’ business?” he asked. “Did Mackenzie and Papineau make you a general in their army?”

  McCain wasn’t put off by Lassiter’s tone. “Mackenzie and Papineau are the generals,” he chuckled. “They’re the founding fathers, as it were. I’m just a hard-working colonel.”

  “Don’t fret about it. You’ll make general yet. If they don’t hang you first.”

  It wasn’t supposed to be a serious suggestion, but McCain looked thoughtful. Lassiter didn’t quite know what the wink was supposed to mean. “Maybe,” the wily the Irishman said.

  Teams of men and horses were dragging logs to repair the breaks in the walls of the fort. They were doing a whole lot better than the so-called squads of infantry marching up and down the grown-over parade ground. Lassiter decided these amateur soldiers would look better if they had uniforms and if their rifles matched. The “soldiers” were every age from boys to old men and the rifles they carried so awkwardly included everything from smoothbore Springfield muskets to Remington repeaters.

  “You got your work cut out for you, Colonel,’’ Lassiter told the Irishman.

  McCain told Lassiter to get over to the mess hall while he reported to the two generals. He winked again. Lassiter watched McCain follow Emile Roberge into the commandant’s office. The commandant’s office, even with recent repairs, was busy falling down like the rest of Fort Liberté.

  In the mess hall Lassiter knew he’d been wrong about smelling fried ham. An old man with a bald head and a hairy face dished up a bowl of pea soup, a hunk of brown bread, and a mug of bitter coffee. From where he was sitting the jailhouse hash began to look almost good to Lassiter.

  The door of the mess hall slammed open, and five men came in, Americans by the look of them, more accustomed to riding than walking. Lassiter didn’t know any of them, but he didn’t have to guess what they were. Gunslinger was written all over them, in the way they carried themselves but especially in their faces. They bitched about the pea soup, but they sat down and ate it. One of them, a wiry kid with an uncreased new Stetson on the back of his head, reached inside his quilted coat and took out a pint bottle of whiskey and poured some into his coffee.

  The door opened again and a sixth man walked in, spurs jingling. Lassiter didn’t look up from his food until one of the gunmen called out, “Guess what, Greeley—pea soup again.”

  “If it ain’t Lassiter,” the man called Greeley said.

  “Hello, Greeley,” Lassiter said.

  Greeley was about the same size as Lassiter, about the same age, maybe a year or two younger. It had been more than five years since that all-day poker game in the Alhambra Saloon in El Paso. Greeley lost fifteen hundred dollars to Lassiter, then came back later, drunk and wanting to take it back. Greeley knew Lassiter didn’t cheat at cards. He just wanted his money back. It was as simple as that. He thought it was simple because he figured himself faster than Lassiter. Lassiter knew Greeley had held that mistaken opinion for a considerable length of time. He showed Greeley how wrong he was. Instead of killing him, which was his right, he took Greeley’s gun away and bent it across his thick skull.

  Looking at his old poker pal, Lassiter shifted the spoon to his left hand. That could mean something or nothing. What it meant depended on Greeley, how long he nursed a grudge, that is, if he nursed a grudge—and how eager he was to start a shoot-out before breakfast.

  Greeley cracked a big smile and put his backside on a vacant table, legs swinging. He rolled a cigarette and touched a match to it. He snapped his fingers at the kid with the bottle. “Go light on the coffee,” he said. “I got me a head this morning. Damn, don’t it never warm up in Canada?”

  Greeley drank the whiskeyed coffee, shuddered and made a face like a man chewing on a lemon. “Same again, bartender,” he ordered the kid.

  “You ought to try the soup,” Lassiter told him.

  “You try it.” Greeley rubbed the top of his head through his flat-crowned hat. He laughed, squinting with pain. “Hells bells, Lassiter. I declare my head ain’t felt so bad since me and you had that mix-up back in El Paso.”

  Lassiter figured he could kill, say, three of them before they put out his lights. He knew he could do that if he had to. He began to wish he’d finished the job he started on Greeley.

  “You kind of asked for it, Greeley,” he said.

  Greeley put away the second drink, threw the cigarette stub on the plank floor, and started to roll another one. “I guess I did at that,” he told Lassiter. The way he spoke was offhand, relaxed, casual, and Lassiter didn’t believe it. “’Course you didn’t have to crack me hard as you did. But what the hell—no hard feelings.”

  “None by me,” Lassiter said, not one bit sure that it wouldn’t come to killing as soon as Greeley put enough liquor in his belly. That could be thirty minutes from now, or thirty days. If they both lived that long.”

  “Come to join the rebellion, have you, Lassiter?” the gunman asked. “Hey, why don’t you join up with my outfit?”

  Lassiter asked what outfit that was.

  “The Irishman wants to call us the First Irregulars, but I don’t see the sense of that since there ain’t any Second Irregulars: Greeley’s Raiders has a better ring to it, I’d say.�
��

  “Sounds right dashing,” Lassiter commented, knowing it was the wrong thing to say but saying it anyway.

  Greeley lost the grin on his face. When he decided that Lassiter was just making an observation, he put the smile back in place. “Yeah, don’t it,” he said. “What do you think, Lassiter? You want to join up with us?”

  Lassiter was able to give an honest answer. “I don’t know what I want to do, Greeley. And that’s a fact.”

  The Irishman came in followed by the half-breed Baptiste. Lassiter noticed that the half-breed stayed close to McCain wherever he went, like a performing bear trailing after its trainer.

  “Morning, boys,” McCain said, brisk and officer like.

  The hard cases muttered. McCain frowned at the bottle of whiskey standing on the table. Greeley ignored the sour look.