When he’d gained the bank’s grassy lip, a gloved hand reached over it. Haskell took it. The man’s fingers closed around Haskell’s hand, and he pulled Haskell up and over the bank with a raspy grunt.
The big lawman collapsed, water gurgling in his throat as he tried to breathe. There was another grunt as two gloved hands rolled him over. A hatted head slid between Bear and the sky. Two watery blue eyes stared down at him from a gray-bearded face as craggy and sunburned as all Nevada.
“Why, ya crazy tomcat—what the fuck you doin’ in the river?”
Stumpy Spooner, government tracker, grinned, showing his oversized false teeth between thin, cracked lips, the lower lip showing a deep blue-black spot where a cheap quirley was always clamped.
Haskell stared up at the far older man for a full thirty seconds before he finally found the strength to push up onto his elbows. He was still trying to catch his breath and hack all of the water out of his lungs.
He looked at Stumpy sitting beside him, staring at him expectantly from under the brim of his badly weathered Boss of the Plains Stetson, which was so big it always made Stumpy’s head resemble a brown egg crowned by a stone coffee mug.
“Where in the hell have you been, you son of a bitch?” Haskell raked out, spitting more water to one side.
Stumpy’s eyes snapped wide in shock. “Where I been? Where do you think I been, you ungrateful pup? I been gallopin’ like a bat out of hell, followin’ you downstream so’s I could rescue your miserable ass, which I just did, in case you didn’t notice!”
Haskell cleared his throat, hacking up sand and other muck from the river, and spitting it to one side. “Why didn’t you help me in town when they were beating the living hell out of me? You had to have seen what was happening out on the street. I left you in the livery barn!”
“Oh, I seen what was happenin’, all right. Five against one. Them’s long odds. But what woulda been the point of my enterin’ the fray? I’m old and stove up like an arthritic old mutt, and you know my ticker’s loggy as an eighty-year-old whore.” Stumpy pressed both gloved hands to his chest as though to cradle the delicate organ of topic. “I’d have had me a heartstroke before I could have thrown a single punch!”
Haskell looked at the old Colt bristling up from the holster on Stumpy’s right hip. “You could have at least pulled that hogleg on ’em!”
“Bear, my eyes!” Stumpy raised his hands to point to the two new compromised organs of topic. “I can hardly see my own hand in front of my face let alone those five rascals turnin’ you inside out and stompin’ you clear down to perdition from clear across the street! If I woulda drawed down on ’em, and had to shoot at ’em, I like as not I woulda hit you! Now, you wouldn’t have wanted that to happen, now, would you, ya ungrateful pup?”
“I’d probably be a lot better off, you worthless old coon hound!”
“No, sir—you wouldn’t have been!”
“What were you doin’ while I was getting beat silly? Watching from the comfort of the livery barn?”
“I don’t see why you think it was so galldanged comfortable, Bear ... ”
Haskell tried to narrow an eye at the old tracker, but, swollen as it was to the size of a pink egg, the eye wouldn’t narrow anymore than it already had, which was to a very thin slit. “I bet you and that old hog-wollopin’ swamper, Vernon Keel, were betting to see how long I’d last, weren’t you?”
Stumpy’s eyes widened again, and his lower jaw dropped. He appeared to want to say something but no words came out.
“That’s it, ain’t it?” Bear said, flaring an enraged nostril. “You two were betting on me.”
Stumpy wagged his head slowly, as though deep in shock. “Bear, I can’t believe you’d accuse me of such a lowdown dirty stunt such as that. It grieves me. Purely it does—right down to my bones!”
“How much did you win ... or lose?”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
Stumpy glanced away. Nervously, he licked his lips, ran his gloved hands down his thighs, and then gave a sheepish, twitching grin. “Five dollars. Bear, if you could’ve stood up for just twenty more sec—!”
“Stumpy, you son of a bitch! Do you know the only thing lowlier than you is a horse apple at the bottom of the plop?”
“Ah, come on, Bear! Have a sense of humor, would ya? No harm done. I just decided that since I couldn’t help, I might try to earn a little extra cash. Hell, Uncle Sam has cut my wages down to pennies an’ piss water. Why, a man can’t feed himself on the wages the government pays for my expert services!”
“Expert services, my ass!”
“Expert services!”
“Making bets while I, your partner, is getting his bones ground to a fine salt!”
“They pay me to track, and that’s all they pay me for!” Stumpy slapped his knee in anger. “I don’t get paid to get into fisticuffs with polecats such as them that turned you to puddin’. I don’t get paid for throwin’ down on ’em with my hogleg, neither. That there is what I would call hazard pay, and Uncle Sam don’t pay for that. I get paid to track and that’s it! I bet Marshal Dade won’t pay me nothin’ extra for running you down and draggin’ your sorrowful ass out of that river, neither. Harumph!”
“Oh, Christ!” Haskell chuckled without mirth and worked his jaw, trying to determine if it was broken.
“You might thank me,” Stumpy said, sounding indignant now. Downright pouty.
“What’s that?”
“The least you could do is thank me for savin’ your bacon. True, it might’ve come later rather than sooner, but you’re still kickin’, ain’t ya?”
“Just shut up, Stumpy! Why don’t you gather some wood and build a fire, for chrissakes. I gotta get dried out.”
“I was just gonna do that.”
“Well, hop to it, then!” Haskell bellowed. “Or are you afraid Uncle Sam won’t pay you for that?”
“Oh, you’re just one colicky ole cuss, Bear Haskell. One colicky, ungrateful old Yankee cuss! No one could ever mistake you for a Southerner, that’s for sure!” Stumpy, who hailed from Alabama and who’d fought for the Confederacy, limped off to where his and Haskell’s geldings stood ground-reined.
“Thanks for the compliment,” Haskell called to him. “But it’s not gonna change my opinion of you, you worthless old Rebel. Before you start gatherin’ wood, give me your bottle. I got some pain to kill!”
“Right there’s your horse,” Stumpy griped, pointing. “Drink from your own damn bottle!”
“I want yours!”
Cursing, Stumpy rummaged around in his saddlebags for a hide-wrapped whiskey bottle, and brought it over to Haskell, who sat back against a rock. Stumpy unwrapped the bottle, gave it to Bear, and said, “What’s the plan? Start back to Denver first thing in the mornin’?”
“Not first thing.” Haskell popped the cork on the bottle. “First thing, I’m gonna ride back into Henry’s Ford and finish the job I started—runnin’ Scully Crow and them other stagecoach robbers to ground. I’m gonna hit ’em with the additional charge of assaulting with the intention of killing a deputy U.S. marshal ... while the deputy marshal’s tracking buddy lounged around in a livery barn betting on the outcome of the fight!”
“That don’t sound like no official charge to me,” Stumpy opined. “Don’t you think you’d better go on home, Bear? Live to fight another day? Boy, you don’t look so good. I got me a feelin’ if you face those boys again, the outcome might get even uglier.”
“Couldn’t get any uglier.” Haskell took a deep pull from the bottle then glared up at the oldster who stood over him, staring skeptically down at him. “If you’re waitin’ for me to pay you to fetch firewood, Stump, you’re gonna get paid in hot lead first!”
“Tarnation, I never seen such a colicky pup!” Stumpy cried, throwing up his arms in defeat as he ambled off in search of deadfall.
“Tracker, my ass!”
“Best one you ever rode with, you ungrateful blue-be
lly!”
The truth was Stumpy had it right. The graybeard was probably the best tracker Haskell had ever ridden with, which is why he always requested Gibbs whenever there were men to track and damned little obvious sign.
Stumpy had grown up “barefoot-an’-possum poor” in the Alabama hills, where he and his father and brothers had had to track and shoot game to survive. There were no grocery stores out that way. After the war, Stumpy had come west and hired out as a tracker with the Southwestern cavalry. Drunk on moonshine, he could track a petal from a flowering peach tree on a windy day, as the saying went, having further cut his teeth on tracking Apaches through that hot, rocky country down near the border.
The old man’s eyes weren’t what they used to be, but they were still better than he let on. It was true that his heart was slowly giving out, and arthritis was gnawing his joints. That was why Haskell wasn’t really as mad at him as he’d pretended to be. At least, the anger he’d directed at Stumpy had been more for Scully Crow’s bunch than Stumpy though it did piss-burn the big lawman that while he’d been getting hammered flat and kicked loco on Henry’s Ford’s main street, Stumpy had been holed up with the drunken livery barn wrangler, exchanging bets.
At least, Stumpy had bet on him, though, Haskell thought now with a wry chuckle, taking another pull from Stumpy’s bottle while the oldster scrounged around in the brush along the stream for wood.
And he’d lost five dollars.
Haskell smiled again. He took another long pull from the bottle.
Chapter Three
Haskell had a lousy night’s sleep around the fire.
He ached too much to get much more than a few winks now and then. He revised his previous assessment of his ribs as badly bruised rather than broken, but badly bruised ribs could bark just as loudly as broken ones.
Add that misery to the his battered face and head and swollen eyes and creaky hips, and you had one miserable federal lawman enduring one hell of a long, cold, miserable mountain night under the stars. It didn’t help that he had to listen to his trail partner, Stumpy Gibbs, sawing logs loudly enough for three drunken Irish sailors. When the tracker wasn’t snoring, he was snickering in his sleep and urging some woman named Marge to “Go a little lower,” “Go a little lower, will ya, there, Margie?” Then he’d snicker again before the long, raucous snores resumed.
Haskell was awake well before dawn.
He let Stumpy sleep. He was in no hurry to hear the oldster’s grunting, yawning, hacking, and ceaseless morning farting. Old age was a bear Haskell was in no hurry to wrestle.
He was also in no hurry to get back into Henry’s Ford. He’d wait a couple of hours, giving Scully Crow and the other hard-tails time to get good and drunk in the Bare Naked Lady again before he threw down on them. They were celebrating as well as spending the twenty-five thousand dollars in mine company payroll they’d stolen off the Highland Stage Company out of Crystal Creek. They likely figured that the lawman who’d been trailing them was halfway to the Gulf of Mexico by now, lolling around in a coffin full of the Arkansas River. Bear didn’t want it any other way. In his condition, he needed every advantage he could find.
When he’d built a small fire and set a pot of coffee on the flames to boil, Haskell sat back against a deadfall tree and dug one of his favored Indian Kid cigars out of the pocket of his red-and-black calico shirt.
He’d purchased the Indian Kids, six for twenty-five cents, from a small shop in his hometown of Denver, where he kept a small suite of rooms in the Larimer Hotel. The suite was more expensive than he could afford on a federal lawman’s salary, but the toney digs sat just down the street from the Federal Building on Capitol Hill, which he worked out of, under the supervision of Chief Marshal Henry Dade of Denver’s First District Court, serving the states and territories of the Western District.
Prudence would have dictated that a man of Bear’s modest means secure a small room in a boarding house on the poor side of Cherry Creek, where his unwashed ilk tended to settle. But Prudence was a haughty bitch whom Bear preferred to ignore. He liked the Larimer just fine; he enjoyed nestling in the lap of luxury between assignments chasing some of the gnarliest badmen on the western frontier. Since he’d fought for the Union in the War Between the States, as a guerilla-fighting Zouave of the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers, running dangerous missions behind Confederate lines, he’d gotten accustomed to the knowledge that life was both fleeting and fragile. Then as now, he could be killed at any time.
And dear Prudence had never promised any man that he’d be able to take the money he’d saved in her honor through those glistening pearly gates everybody talked so much about in glowing terms.
“Hey, you old catamount,” he said, lightly kicking the still-snoring Stumpy Gibbs, after he’d enjoyed one cup of coffee and one Indian Kid here alone with just the river’s quiet roar and his own thoughts for company. “Time to rise and stretch the knots out of your rancid, hillbilly hide. Time to go bust some heads!”
It took Stumpy a good, long time to get up, get awake, get dressed, to stop hacking and farting and yawning, and to stop stumbling around and actually get moving. So it was nearly mid-morning before he and Bear were riding the trail back up to Henry’s Ford.
As they rode stirrup to stirrup, the high-altitude sun burning down through their hats, slowly walking their horses along the steeply pitched wagon trail, Haskell shucked the big Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 Schofield revolver from the soft holster positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.
He broke open the top-break piece, which was nickel-finished and boasted a seven-inch barrel, and plucked a fresh cartridge from one of the two shell belts encircling his waist. (He’d hated it when, long ago pinned down against more owlhoots than he could count, he’d run out of cartridges, so he kept a good supply attached to his person.) He shoved the bullet into the chamber he normally kept empty beneath the hammer, so he didn’t accidentally shoot his pecker off, and closed the heavy gun, chambered in the .44 caliber like his rifle. He didn’t like to get complicated by toting around more than one caliber bullet.
Bear Haskell was appropriately named. Bear was his given one. It had been the nickname of his great grandfather, Zekial Haskell, a heroic freedom fighter in the Revolutionary War. By all accounts, his grandson was his spitting image—a big, burly man, a striking one, an alluring one, by most women’s standards. The fairer sex was drawn to him irresistibly. There was a primitive pull.
Most men found him intimidating though that was due mostly to his size, for Bear was good-natured but also quick to rile. He was tender without being timid, but when pushed he could tear a saloon apart and leave it little more than strewn matchsticks. If Haskell’s broad-shouldered, muscular, six-foot-six stature didn’t turn heads when he walked into a room, the dark, ruggedly chiseled face with warm, deep-set blue-gray eyes usually did.
His thick, dark-brown hair curled down over his collar. A hide thong adorned with grizzly claws hung from his neck, down over his calico shirt—his one note of ostentation. (He’d killed the bear himself, before it could have eaten him, and he saw the teeth as a totem of sorts but also as an emblem of kinship with his great-grandfather, who was said to have worn a bear claw necklace of his own, taken from a bruin who’d tried to dine on him.) This Bear wore a bullet-crowned black hat with a braided rawhide band, and dark-green canvas trousers, the cuffs of which he always wore stuffed down into the high, mule-eared tops of his cavalry style boots.
Residing in a pocket sewn into the well of his right boot was the “Blue Jacket”, .44-caliber pocket revolver manufactured by Hopkins & Allen—a beautiful piece with gutta-percha grips and a leaf motif scrolled into the nickel finish.
Haskell slid the Schofield into its holster as his rented sorrel clomped into Henry’s Ford—a quiet little hamlet comprised of mostly log buildings scattered along the shoulder of a steep, forested mountain, on the west bank of the Arkansas River.
The town had been a rollicking place at one
time. Haskell, who’d ridden through here before, remembered it well. It had once boasted a good seven or eight saloons and nearly that many hurdy-gurdy houses. Now, only three saloons remained, as well as that many sporting parlors, which was still an impressive amount of skull pop and parlor girls for a population that had likely dwindled to well under a hundred, counting whores, feral cats, and mongrel dogs.
Smoke from breakfast fires billowed down over the narrow, winding main street from chimney pipes. There weren’t many people out and about just yet in Henry’s Ford. One stocky young man in a shabby, ill-fitting, mismatched suit was dutifully shoveling horse dung out of the street and into a wheel barrel. He watched, wide-eyed, as Haskell and Stumpy approached him.
Haskell leaned down and kept his voice low, hooking a finger at the younker, who swallowed anxiously and shuffled forward.
“Boy, are them five jaspers still throwing down in the Bare Naked Lady?” Bear tossed his head toward the saloon just up the street on the left, two stories tall and badly needing paint.
The kid looked at Bear as though he was seeing a ghost. “Y-yessir,” he said, his sunburned cheeks splotching white.
“Are they up-an’-at-it yet?”
“Most like. I don’t think they never went to bed. They been drinkin’ an’ gamblin’ an’ makin’ the whores scream upstairs in the Lady all night, but I think they’re all back downstairs, gamblin’ again now. They ... they been celebratin’ your ... your ... ”
“Son, the news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated.” Haskell winked at the stunned younker, and flipped him a silver dollar. The kid caught it awkwardly against his chest. “For a sarsaparilla later.”
The kid thanked Bear and then backed away, still eyeing the beaten and battered lawman as though he were something from another world. Haskell gigged his horse over to the Bare Naked Lady. Stumpy followed him from several feet behind.
As Bear approached the saloon, he heard the loud, raucous, drunken voices of the men who’d turned him inside out and tried to kick him out with a cold shovel. Or a cold river, as the case had been ...
The Jackals of Sundown (A Bear Haskell Western Book 2) Page 2
