The Edge of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  “Ain’t that dangerous?”

  “No sense in risking any legitimate businesses,” Colter said. “Or getting innocent people killed.”

  Jed Reno spit. “Boy, you’ll figure out at some point that there ain’t no legitimate businesses in a town like Violence. And ain’t no innocent folks would call this place home.”

  They walked to the middle of Union Street, a wide street, made for the big freight wagons that would haul rails and crossties and telegraph poles as the railroad moved westward across the plains. But now that the railroad had moved, practically all the way to Laramie City, there was little traffic on the streets of Violence.

  “Go,” Colter whispered.

  Leaning on the mop-turned-crutch, Mix Range began hobbling down the street, more like dragging his shackled leg, while Colter and Reno followed. Reno shifted the long Hawken and pulled the big Colt out of the holster, thumbing back the hammer. He shifted the Colt to his left hand, returned the heavy Hawken to his right. The rifle weighed a ton—so did the heavy Colt—but Jed Reno showed no strain. It looked as if he walked down Union Street with feather dusters in his hands.

  “I thought you used to say that one shot’s all a man needs.”

  “I used to say a lot of things,” Reno said. “Times change.”

  They fell silent. Moved past the intersection of Union and Second. Reno and Colter could see the corral and lean-to now, at Union and Sixth, but those two blocks seemed miles away. With a thirty-pound weight on his left ankle, and having already limped from the corral-turned-jail to Slade’s joint, Mix Range would not make good time. Colter thought about stopping, fetching the key from his jacket—he had lied to Slade about hiding the key—and unlocking the shackle. But that would take time, too, to get that cumbersome, heavy chunk of metal off the prisoner’s ankle, and then Colter’s attention would be on the Oregon Boot, and not the street, the wooden façades of the buildings, the windows, the corners, every place where a gun could be pointed at them right now.

  Halfway between Second and Fourth. That’s when they saw the smoke, thick and black.

  “Sons of bitches!” Jed Reno roared. “They’re burning my place.”

  Then the gunshots erupted.

  Two men. One by the mercantile with the post office, up on the roof. Firing rapidly with a revolver. The other on the north side of the street, using a water barrel at the corner of the last building, still under construction, at the corner of Fourth and Union. He, too, fired a revolver.

  The one on the roof, shooting down, would have the worst angle, so Colter trained the LeMat on the man behind the water barrel. Reno, even though he was closer to the shooter on the north side of the street, lifted the Hawken toward the roof. The man lifted his head, to take aim, and the big rifle roared. A pink mist wafted in the air, and the man was flying backward, tumbling off the roof, landing in the alley between the mercantile–post office and another building marked:

  FOR RENT

  See Jasper Monroe

  Barber-Mayor

  Colter felt a bullet whistle past his right ear, but he knew that that shot did not come from the guy behind the barrel or, especially, not from the guy whose head Jed Reno had just blown off.

  “Behind us, Jed!” Colter shouted. He kept the LeMat pointed at the water barrel, and when the man came around the side, the big revolver bucked in Colter’s hand.

  The bullet caught the assassin in his shoulder, spun him out from behind the water barrel and into the dirt. He came up quickly, fanning the hammer and keeping his finger on the trigger. Bullets barked, but spit up mostly dirt—well short of Colter, Reno, or Mix Range, who lay on the ground, covering his head with hands and arms, while wailing like a newborn calf.

  Colter squeezed the trigger again. It caught the wounded man as he ran past the water barrel. Another shot from the LeMat lifted the killer off his feet, and slammed him through the frames of the business that was being built.

  Hearing a shot from Reno’s Colt, Colter spun around. Two more men were shooting, one from the roof on the north side of the street, the other with a Henry rifle at the near corner of The Blarney Stone.

  The one with the Henry was the most dangerous.

  “I’ve got the rifle,” Colter cried out.

  “Then get him, boy, before he gets us.”

  Reno shifted his Colt, squeezed the trigger. A lot of men, greenhorns, would have fired often. That was the good thing about a revolving pistol. You could shoot six times—though usually just five, if you kept the chamber under the hammer empty—without having to reload. But Jed Reno came from the flintlock and single-shot days. You never wasted a shot. One was all you need. Because one was likely all you had.

  The bullet hit the man on the roof in the stomach. He straightened, tightened, but did not fall. Nor did he drop his Colt. He struggled to cock back the hammer, but before he could finish, Jed Reno had squeezed the trigger on the Colt again. That one caught the wounded man’s throat, and a river of crimson sprayed as the man collapsed and disappeared. He did not fall off the roof, because that building had a flat roof. But Jed Reno knew that gunman was done for.

  A bullet punched through the crown of Reno’s hat. He whirled toward the man with the Henry repeating rifle, and called out Tim Colter’s name.

  But Tim Colter was no longer beside the old mountain man.

  Reno blinked his one eye, swallowed down the fear and surprise, and yelled, “Boy, what are you doing?”

  Tim Colter did not answer. He was too busy charging, running through the dirt and globs of drying mud, heading straight for the man beside the gambling den with a rifle that could riddle a man with. 44-caliber bullets.

  The LeMat barked. Smoke billowed like a cloud, and Tim Colter ran through the white smoke. He pulled the trigger again.

  Reno moved around, trying to find a clear shot at the gunman with the rifle, but he couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the running Tim Colter in the back. Then he remembered that there could be other killers. Four men already. How many would Micah Slade have sent? Or were these sent by Paddy O’Rourke? Or by someone else? Did Mix Range have any friends?

  Seeing nothing, Reno turned back. Colter stopped running, turned around, aimed at a spot beyond Slade’s Saloon. This time, it was the LeMat’s ten-gauge that spoke just as a man stepped from that corner of the building. Buckshot drilled his chest, and the man fell backward and lay in a heap.

  Reno blinked, and saw the man with the Henry rifle. He didn’t know how Colter had managed, but he was still standing, apparently not moving, while the gunman with the repeating rifle sat, legs outstretched, leaning against the side of The Blarney Stone, head tilted to his right, maybe three bullet holes in the center of his white shirt.

  A noise came behind Reno, and he spun, cocking the Colt, aiming, but not shooting.

  Mix Range was raising up, mouth open, eyes blank, looking at the dead men on the street and beside buildings. He could not see the dead man on the roof, of course.

  Walking back toward them was Deputy U.S. Marshal Tim Colter. His jacket flapped in the wind, and sunlight showed through the bullet holes in that piece of canvas.

  CHAPTER 22

  “You ain’t hurt?” Reno asked when Colter stopped a few feet in front of him.

  “Nope.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  Colter shrugged an answer, and began reloading the LeMat. Jed Reno crossed the street, picked up the dropped weapons of the dead man lying in the unfinished building, and brought them back before he began to reload the Hawken first, and then the Colt.

  Finished, they looked back at Slade’s Saloon, but by then, the streets were starting to fill with other people. Too many witnesses, Colter decided, for any more shooting. And with the streets littered with dead men, Tim Colter figured the chances of more violence in Violence were slim.

  Now they looked down toward the trading post Jed Reno had built. Orange flames leaped from the building, showering the air with sparks that disappeared ins
ide the thick plumes of smoke.

  “It takes a mean son of a bitch to burn down a man’s business and home,” Reno said.

  “Violence is full of mean people.” Colter moved over to Mix Range, whose face remained without color and whose body kept shaking. Somehow, he had not been hit by the dozens of bullets fired, either. Maybe Slade’s men—if they were hired by Micah Slade—hadn’t been trying to kill the killer from Alabama, just Tim Colter and Jed Reno.

  Kneeling, Colter fingered the big iron key from his pocket, and slipped it inside the hole. He turned, heard the click, and slowly separated the two U-shaped irons that formed the shackle.

  “Have a seat, Mix,” Colter said, and the frightened killer did as he was told, allowing the lawman to carefully remove the Oregon Boot.

  “Might as well see if we can salvage something, Jed,” Colter said as he stood. He held the heavy boot in his left hand, the LeMat still in his right.

  “What about them?” Reno pointed the barrel of the Colt at one of the dead men.

  Colter shrugged. “They’re not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  Nothing from the post could be salvaged, but Reno, Colter, and even Mix Range kept busy, soaking saddle blankets from well buckets and beating out the flames that the sparks started in the grass. The mule and Colter’s and Reno’s horses had moved away from the heat of the flames and the choking smoke, but the men who had started the fire had not bothered to steal the horses. Maybe they thought they would be able to get the horses easy enough, once Jed Reno and Tim Colter lay dead on Union Street.

  Within a few minutes, some railroad workers jumped off a handcar and ran to help contain the fire. They were not about to see the flames rip across the tracks of the Union Pacific, maybe damage the crossties or even sweep down and burn a trestle a few miles westward. The Union Pacific would not care much for that kind of delay.

  Railroaders, Colter thought. Not the mayor. Not the land speculators. Not even Eugene Harker. No one from the town, not that he had expected anyone from Slade’s Saloon or The Blarney Stone. But the townsmen? The wind was blowing in the direction that could have pushed the flames straight into Violence.

  Another handcar brought more railroad men, good, solid Irishmen. Colter had heard that the men building this railroad were nothing but burly drunks who cared nothing about what they were doing—helping a nation, still struggling to recover after a grueling four years of war, grow. They just wanted their paycheck, their beer, and their whiskey. And maybe, just maybe, they were just trying to save their railroad, and the work they had already done. But they were here. Helping.

  Even Mix Range worked hard.

  Maybe two hours passed before the cabin and dugout lay in smoking, charred ruins, and the grass, for perhaps fifty or sixty yards around the cabin, was bristled and black, smoking, the ground hot underneath the scorched earth.

  Wearily Colter led the procession of men, their clothes drenched with sweat, faces and hands or gloves blackened with soot, away from the ruins, over fresh grass that had not burned. Colter sat on the iron rail of the track. The others sat on the rails or squatted on the grass. For perhaps five minutes, no one spoke. Two of the men—a burly redhead with shoulders almost as wide as the width between the iron rails, and a tall man with a bald head but long beard—walked to the livestock. When they returned, letting the horses and mule graze, they, too, sat down.

  “I’d . . .” Reno had to stop, spit phlegm between his buckskin legs. “Give y’all some of my Taos Lightning, boys. But it all burned up.”

  “No need,” said one of the railroaders. “Glad to help. Sorry we couldn’t save nothin’.”

  Reno waved off the apology.

  “Maybe we saved the town,” the bald man, with the big beard, said.

  They looked eastward, saw the town’s buildings, sod huts, canvas structures. They heard the whining of the saws, the pounding of hammers, and the cacophony of voices. Music came from the saloons and gambling parlors. Even a few chirpies could be heard, calling out to men—possibly other railroad workers—as they walked past the brothels and cribs. The wind was blowing away from Reno, Colter, and the other firefighters. Which meant those soiled doves had to be screaming their catcalls really loud.

  Mix Range coughed.

  Two other men were bringing water buckets from the well. Sometimes, even railroaders, mountain men, and deputy United States marshals found water to be better than whiskey.

  “Saved the town,” another Irishman repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  As they lined up to cup hands into the buckets and slake their thirsts, as no one even thought about just how dirty those hands were, just how refreshing that water tasted, they stepped back and looked across the rolling plains at the town known as Violence.

  “You reckon . . .” It was Jed Reno who spoke. “That a town like that was even worth saving?”

  * * *

  “Good day for business,” Tim Colter said as he stepped inside the undertaking side of the office of the mayor of Violence, Jasper Monroe.

  It was a strange office. Two barber chairs and a bench for those men waiting for haircuts or shaves were on one side, with a Navajo blanket separating that part of the barbershop from a bathtub. The other side, which did not even have a blanket for separation or privacy, had one long table and two pine caskets leaning against the wall. The caskets would be reserved for special customers, a luxury few dead men in this part of the world could afford.

  The men Reno and Colter had shot dead on the streets certainly would not be resting for eternity in such comfort. Eugene Harker had laid the corpses on blankets, and those blankets were not Navajo, but cheap woolen rags that had been providing rats with food and stuff for their nests.

  Monroe knelt over one body, the one Jed Reno had shot in the head with the massive Hawken rifle. That was the only corpse whose head and face had been covered with a vest. The other dead men were stretched out, arms folded across their chests, legs crossed at the ankles, boots removed—along with, Colter guessed, wallets, watches, watch fobs, greenbacks, coins, guns, and anything else of value.

  Monroe’s eyes were cold.

  “I’m always busy in a town like this,” he said. “But maybe not quite as busy until you came to town.”

  Colter looked at the dead men. “You recognize any of them?”

  “No,” Monroe said.

  “How about you, Mr. Harker?”

  The black man looked up in surprise. “Me, sir?”

  “Yeah.” He pointed to the one who had held the Henry rifle. “Him, for instance?”

  Eugene Harker shot a nervous glance at Monroe, who pretended to busy himself with another corpse.

  “Not by name, I reckon,” the freedman finally answered, and reached up to mop his brow with a handkerchief he fetched from his back pocket. Finished with the sweat, he sighed. “Just seen him around.”

  Colter kept his eyes on Jasper Monroe. The mayor-barber-undertaker was not a good poker player.

  “Any of the others?” Colter asked, still looking at the mayor.

  “Can’t say for certain. Folks tend to look the same in a town like this. Might have been on the railroad. Well, none of ’em was farmers. I know that much.”

  “They weren’t gunmen, either,” Colter said. “They sure couldn’t shoot worth a nickel.” He pointed at the one with the blood-soaked cloth over his head. “And him?”

  “Nah.” This time it was the mayor who answered. “He was a stranger.” Rising, he stared across the hot room, already smelling of the dead, at the freedman. “Isn’t that right, Eugene?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Negro said.

  Colter grinned without humor. “How can you tell, boys? With his head blown off ?”

  Silence. Finally the mayor cleared his throat. “His face was fine.”

  So Colter knelt and removed the vest. Behind him came a heavy sigh from Eugene Harker. It had been an ugly wound, but Jasper Monroe had been telling the truth. The ball from the Ha
wken had hit the man above his right eye, traveled upward, blown out the top of his skull. It was an ugly wound, but most of his face, frozen in the hard death, remained easy to identify.

  Colter had never seen him.

  He re-covered the face and stared at the mayor.

  “I’ll be taking the marshal’s badge now, Mayor.”

  Monroe squinted in a lack of understanding.

  “You have a badge,” he said, and pointed at the five-point star.

  “Right. But I might as well be marshal of Violence, too.”

  “Violet.”

  “Violence.” The mayor did not try to correct Colter again.

  “Well . . .”

  “Who gave the job to B.B. Cutter?”

  Monroe did not answer.

  Colter put the palm of his right hand on the butt of the LeMat.

  “I reckon I did.”

  “So I figured you could appoint me marshal. I still have the letter you mailed, requesting me for the job.” That was a lie. The letter had been forwarded on, with Colter’s rejection, to the territorial marshal in Boise. But Colter had learned that white lies, or even bigger ones, sometimes came with the job as a lawman.

  “I can send a telegraph to Council Bluffs.” Colter changed his tune. “Towns don’t survive without the Union Pacific’s backing, you know. And the Union Pacific wants law and order in the town of Violet.” This time he used the town’s actual name.

  “All right.” Mayor Monroe moved from the undertaking part of the business to the barbershop, disappeared behind the rug that served as a curtain, or maybe a wall, and Colter heard the opening of a metal box, followed by the rustling of papers, the clink of metal, and then the mayor’s feet on the wooden floor. He pushed through the split in the rug and held out a badge. Like Colter’s deputy marshal’s badge, this one was five-pointed, too. He stuck it in his pocket.

  “You ain’t gonna pin it on?” Eugene Harker asked.

  Colter pointed to the federal badge on his lapel. “One target’s enough, don’t you think?”

  The freedman cracked a grin.