Ralph Compton The Convict Trail

by Ralph Compton

  At the end of the room, jammed against the wall, was the kitchen—a stove and a single shelf stacked with chipped white plates and cups. A huge, blackened coffeepot smoked on the stove, improving Kane’s first impression of the place considerably.

  Not so Vito, who looked around with disdain, breathing through his nose as he took in the pervading odor of coffee, mildew, ancient man-sweat and unwashed feet.

  Kane smiled. “Well, they got coffee.”

  “Wonderful,” Vito said smoothly, as though his voice had just been planed.

  A blanket pulled back and a stocky man in striped pants, a dirty red undershirt and a stained apron knotted around his waist stepped into the room. The man was in his mid-fifties and walked with a limp; Kane pegged him for an old ranch cook. He waved a careless hand. “Sit anywhere, gents. As you can see, we ain’t exactly busy.”

  Kane and Vito took a seat, and Kane said, “Coffee first. Then breakfast.”

  “Coffee I got. As to breakfast, I can rustle you up elk steak an’ beans if you care to make a trial of it. You fellers like beans?”

  “Elk an’ beans will do,” Kane said, ignoring Vito’s disapproving glance.

  The cook left to get the coffee, and the young man said, “I swear, if I survive the Western food, I’ll never leave New Orleans again.”

  Kane grinned. “Your brothers knew what they were doing when you were the one they left behind.”

  “That is the duty of the youngest. Besides”—he leaned back while the cook placed a steaming cup in front of him—“I’m the best of us with the revolver.”

  Kane was puzzled. “Vito, what exactly is it you do at the docks?”

  The man thought for a moment, then said, “I’m an enforcer, you might say. I keep the peace and see that our business affairs run smoothly.”

  “So, you’re like a police officer in a way.”

  “You could say that, yes. But the law I enforce is Provanzano law. Above all, I preserve the interests and honor of the family.”

  “Lorraine told me your family is called . . . what was it? Yeah, I remember, the Mafia.”

  Vito’s face hardened. “It is a word recently come into use by certain New York newspapers. It’s nonsense. It means nothing.”

  Kane shrugged. “Meant nothing to me to begin with.”

  The food was surprisingly good and the two men ate with an appetite. After he pushed himself away from the table and smoked a cigarette, Kane called the cook over. “We’ll need rooms.”

  The man nodded. “Dollar a night for a double. The single luxury suites cost two bits extry.”

  “We’ll take the single suites,” Vito said quickly.

  “Dollar for the breakfasts, an’ if you gents will follow me I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  With a long-suffering expression, Vito paid, since Kane made no effort to reach into his pocket.

  The cook pulled back a blanket and the two men followed him into a narrow hallway that ran the full length of the building. Rooms lay on either side, closed off by more blankets on strings.

  “Your suites are at the end of the hall,” the cook said.

  Kane stepped through the blanket that served as a door and wall for his room. The suite consisted of an iron cot, a battered dresser with a basin and pitcher, and a shelf for clothes. The pillow and blankets on the cot seemed reasonably clean and the pine floor was swept.

  He walked back outside. Vito turned and saw him, the expression on his face that of an animal at bay.

  “Hey, I’ve seen worse,” the marshal said.

  Vito was incredulous, his face long in surprise. “Worse? Where?”

  “Places. Over to Kansas way. I seen worse places over to Kansas way.”

  “God help us,” Vito said.

  “Walk with me.” Kane grinned. “I want to talk to that Frank Dawson feller.”

  “Sure. Anything to get away from here.”

  As they stepped back to the dining room, Kane stuck his head into every room he passed.

  “What are you doing, Marshal?” Vito asked, his irritation evident.

  “I wanted to see what the regular rooms looked like.”

  “Any different?”

  “Yeah, they got two cots instead of one.”

  Outside, the rain was still coming down hard. The iron gray sky hung so low, it looked like a tall man could walk along the street with his feet in the mud, his head in the clouds. The wind was cold, still out of the north, shredded into shrieking gusts by the ragged ridge of the Poteau. Kane bent his head against the downpour, water dripping from his mustache.

  “Wait!” Vito had glanced in the hardware store window. Now he turned and dashed inside. “I’ll be right back,” he said over his shoulder.

  The man emerged a couple of minutes later and pushed open a large, black umbrella. He swung the umbrella over his head and it was immediately made noisy by the kettledrum rumble of the rain.

  “Ah, that’s better,” Vito said. He looked at Kane. “Want to share, Marshal?”

  Kane shrugged. “Sure, why not.” He moved closer to the other man and walked with him a few steps. But when two men share an umbrella, both get wet. He gave it up and resumed his place beside Vito.

  “Don’t poke me in the eye with that thing,” Kane growled. “You’re waving it around my head.”

  Vito had a white-knuckle grip on the handle, like a kid holding on to a silver dollar. “I can’t help it. It’s the wind, Marshal, bumping it around.”

  Kane put space between him and the other man until they reached the jail.

  The adobe had a single barred window to the front and Kane stood next to it. “Dawson,” he said.

  He heard a cot creak, then the sound of feet squelching through mud. A man’s face appeared at the window and a timorous voice said, “I’m Dawson.”

  Kane looked at the man and what he saw did not impress him. Frank Dawson was a small, skinny rat of a man with sly, black eyes and thinning brown hair. He wore a white, collarless shirt and black pants, both stained with mud.

  “Name’s Deputy Marshal Logan Kane out of Judge Isaac Parker’s court. I plan on taking you to Fort Smith to stand trial for murder.”

  Dawson had a reedy, whining voice as unattractive as the man himself. “Parker? The Hanging Judge?”

  “That’s what some folks call him.”

  Urgently now, Dawson said, “I didn’t murder Lily LaBelle, Marshal. You have to believe me. I liked her, I liked her a lot.” He took a half step back from the window. “Look at me. How could a man who looks like me ever get a woman like Lily? All it took was two dollars, when I could scrape it together.”

  Rain hammered on Kane’s hat and he wiped water from his mustache with the back of his hand. “Dawson, you were caught trying to leave town on the night of the murder. And you had Lily’s locket and ring in your pocket.”

  “I wasn’t trying to leave town. I went to the livery to bed down for the night. Katie Gordon lets me do that when I have nowhere else to sleep. Hulin Green came in and he’d been drinking. He’s mean when he drinks, Marshal, mean as a curly wolf. He dragged me out of a stall, beat me with his fists and boots and then told me he found the locket and ring in my pocket.”

  Dawson swallowed hard, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. “They’re going to hang me, Marshal.”

  “No they’re not. That will be up to a jury and Judge Parker.”

  Vito tried to shelter Kane under part of his umbrella but succeeded only in tipping the marshal’s hat over his eyes. “Git away from me with that,” he growled. “Go fur away, Vito, or I swear, I’ll bend the infernal thing over your head.”

  Vito shrugged. “Then I’ll let you get wet.”

  “Yeah, you do that.”

  After Vito left, Kane stepped closer to the jail window and a vile stench assailed his nostrils. “What you got in there, Dawson?” he asked.

  “A bucket. There’s mud on the floor and rats, a lot of rats. They bite me.” His own rodent eyes lifted to the tall
lawman. “Green won’t feed me, Marshal. When I asked him for grub, he said there was no point in feeding a dead man.”

  “I’ll get you out of there,” Kane said. He waved a hand. “I’ll be back.”

  Alarm edged Dawson’s voice. “Where are you going?”

  “To get the key for this here juzgado from Hulin Green.”

  “Then you’ll not ever come back.” More than just words, it was a primitive wail of despair.

  Chapter 26

  Logan Kane joined Vito on the boardwalk. “Now what?” the man asked.

  “We go look for the man called Hulin Green.”

  “What are you planning, Marshal? You going to gun him?”

  Kane shook his head. “Nope, I plan on asking him for a key.”

  Vito’s brown eyes clouded as he thought that through. Then he smiled. “Right, let’s go get the key to the outhouse.”

  “The jail.”

  “Close enough,” Vito said.

  They found Green in the Bucket of Blood. He was drinking coffee at a table, a silver pot and china cup and saucer in front of him.

  Kane’s first impression was that the man was big, very wide and thick across the shoulders, his hands resting on the table like huge hams. Kane had expected to see a buckskin-clad ruffian, but Green affected the dress of the frontier gambler/gunfighter. He wore black broadcloth, a clean, frilled shirt and string tie. His hat was also black, low crowned with a flat brim. Red hair hung in ringlets over his shoulders and he’d curried his facial hair back to a mustache and the pointed imperial that adorned his chin.

  Despite his finery, especially when he lifted cold gray eyes to Kane as he stepped through the door, Hulin Green looked what he was—a dangerous gunman who had killed his man.

  The bartender, a plump, rosy-faced man in a brocade vest, was decanting whiskey from a barrel into bottles. Four men, hard-rock miners by the look of them, were nursing beers at a table, and a couple of others stood at the bar.

  Oil lamps were lit against the gloom of the morning and a potbellied stove glowed cherry red in a corner. The bar was mahogany, out of place in a tar-roofed shack, and it had a wide mirror of veined French glass, imported from the East at considerable expense.

  Like everything else in Baines Flat, the Bucket of Blood had anticipated the coming of the railroad. Now it seemed shabby and worn, like a tired old hag who had never recovered from being jilted at the altar.

  “What can I do for you boys?” the bartender asked, smiling with practiced affability.

  “Coffee,” Kane said.

  “Coming right up.”

  The man found a silver pot under the bar, filled it from the huge pot on the stove and set it on the bar. He produced china cups and saucers and set these beside the pot.

  Kane poured coffee for himself and Vito, then said to the bartender, “I’m looking for a feller, Hulin Green by name.”

  Before the man could answer, Green spoke up, his tone early-morning surly. “That would be me. What do you want?”

  Kane tried the coffee, holding the cup by the rim. He quickly replaced the cup on the saucer. “Hot, hot, hot,” he said, shaking his fingers.

  “I said, what do you want?” Green repeated. The man was not in a sociable frame of mind, that much was obvious.

  “All I want,” Kane said, “is the key to the juzgado.”

  Green’s smile was a white grimace under his mustache that never quite reached his eyes. “And who might you be? You kin to Frank Dawson maybe?”

  “I’m on your right,” Vito said softly.

  Kane nodded without taking his gaze from Green. Slowly, he moved back his slicker with his left hand, revealing the star on his gun belt. “Name’s Logan Kane, Deputy Marshal out of Judge Parker’s court. I plan to take the prisoner to Fort Smith to stand trial for murder.”

  Named gunfighters were few in the West and their reputations spread far. From the end of the War Between the States to the closing of the frontier, perhaps fifty men who had the readiness to kill and the necessary hand and eye coordination to do it well, earned such a distinction—only twoscore and ten out of the millions who at one time or another carried a gun. It was little wonder such men inspired fear and were avoided at all costs.

  Hulin Green was not scared, but his eyes flickered in recognition when he heard Kane’s name. Wherever Western men gathered, they talked about gunfighters and would argue their merits endlessly as they attempted to place them in a lethal hierarchy. Green would have heard of Wes Hardin, Luther Bishop, Jim Masters, Clay Allison, Wesley Barnett, among others . . . and a gunfighting deputy named Logan Kane.

  If Green was intimidated, he didn’t let it show. His voice steady, he said, “I’m hanging Frank Dawson in the morning.” He waved a hand, like a man shooing away a bothersome fly. “Now, be about your business, Marshal, and leave me to mine.”

  Kane felt a familiar quick start of anger, but he held himself level. “Green, Dawson may not be alive in the morning unless I get him out of that stinking, rat-infested hole you call a jail.”

  The gunman shrugged. “His funeral.”

  Kane drank coffee and built and lit a cigarette, he and Green eyeing each other like wolves. The marshal was giving himself time, planning what he was going to say next. Now he said it. “Green, you have a choice. Either you give me the key to the jail or I’ll get an axe and cut the door down.”

  Hulin Green was a short-tempered man. He rose to his feet and brushed his frock coat away from the Colt on his hip. “Kane, I wouldn’t try that if I was you.”

  But the marshal was not a man to back down and everybody in the saloon knew it. He could not walk away from it and let it be known that Green had put the crawl on him.

  “Hulin,” he said, using the man’s given name as a peace gesture, “you’ve made your war talk. Now say something else that makes sense.” He shook his head, his eyes cold. “Don’t make me draw my pistol.”

  Rain throbbed on the saloon roof, and a log of wood fell in the stove. The saloon clock ticked into the silence, loud as rocks falling into a tin bucket. The men behind Green got up hurriedly. Chairs scraped across the pine floor and one tipped over. They stepped to the bar, out of the line of fire. One of the miners was suffering from a lung disease and his breath wheezed like an out-of-tune harmonica in his chest.

  In a close-range gunfight luck is the bastard child of skill, and on that day Hulin Green didn’t seem to be feeling particularly lucky. “If I draw, you’ll kill me,” he said. A pulse in his throat was throbbing.

  “Probably,” Kane said. “Seems to me you’ve got a choice to make.”

  Green exhaled through his teeth. “Key’s in my left coat pocket.”

  “Slowly,” Kane said.

  Green reached into the pocket and laid the key on the table.

  “I’m beholden to you,” Kane said, smiling.

  The gunman swallowed hard, and his struggle between pride and common sense was obvious to everyone in the saloon. Finally sense prevailed. His face like stone, without a word he brushed past Kane and walked outside.

  Wary, Vito changed his position, moving away from the bar to the opposite wall where he could keep an eye on the door and guard Kane’s back.

  The bartender looked at Kane. “Mister, I hope you’re as fast with the iron as you think you are. Hulin Green won’t let that go.”

  The marshal smiled and thumbed over his shoulder at Vito. “I’ve got help.”

  “Hulin Green don’t need help,” the bartender said.

  Kane walked outside to the jail, Vito following him. He called out to Dawson, then turned the key in the lock. A wave of stink hit them like a fist.

  Vito gagged. “Oh, geez . . . oh, my God . . .”

  Out in the open, the man looked even smaller. He was about five foot tall and couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds. His hair was matted, his pants and shirt filthy and his bare feet were caked with dirt and black mud.

  “Where are we taking him, Marshal?” Vito asked.

>   “Back to the hotel.”

  “He stinks like a hog.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Kane said. He looked at Dawson. “How long have you been in there?”

  “About a week, since Lily was murdered.” The little man looked nervously around him. “Where’s Hulin?”

  “He’s sulking,” Kane said. “You’ve had no food or water?”

  “I had water. There was a jug in the jail, but I finished it yesterday.”

  Kane nodded. “Right, come with me.”

  “Where are we going, Marshal?” Dawson asked.

  “The hotel.”

  The marshal grabbed the little man by the back of the neck and marched him through the mud of the street toward the Tontine. There had been no letup in the rain and a thin wind gusted cold.

  At the last moment Kane veered away from the hotel to a zinc horse trough standing outside. He lifted Dawson bodily and threw him into the ice-cold water. The man shrieked and tried to struggle out of the trough, but Kane held his head under. He looked at Vito. “Get a blanket from the hotel.”

  Vito was grinning. “Hell, Marshal, you’re drowning him.”

  “He’ll be all right. Get the blanket.”

  After the other man left, Kane let Dawson up for air. He spluttered and coughed, his eyes wild, and tried to climb out again. The marshal pushed his head under the water, ignoring his pleas for mercy.

  When Vito returned with a blanket, Kane reached into the trough, grabbed Dawson by the front of his shirt and dragged him to his feet. “Feel cleaner now?” he asked.

  The little man’s teeth were chattering so much he couldn’t answer.

  “Now strip those wet rags off’n you.”

  Dawson hesitated, but Kane said, “You do it, or I cut them off with a bowie.”

  Quickly Dawson stripped. His skinny, white body, covered in sparse, black hair, had erupted all over in goose bumps.

  Kane took the blanket from the grinning Vito and threw it over the little man’s head and shoulders. “Let’s get you something to eat,” he said.