.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Oh, I imagine he’ll be up and around by tomorrow. I don’t recommend that he stray too far from bed, though, for several days. A week would be best.” She hooked a thumb to indicate behind her, where the steam kettle was whistling in earnest. “Would you care for some tea, Mr. Spurr?”

  She did not wait for his response but swung around and strode into the kitchen, her muslin skirt swishing about her long legs. Spurr couldn’t help taking a quick appraisal of her full, round ass, then found himself blushing when she glanced at him sidelong as she removed the teapot from the stove lid. She kept one eye on him and arched her brow with apparent, albeit subtle, reproof.

  Shit, she’d caught him. You’d think he’d learn . . .

  “No, ma’am. No, thank you,” he said, feeling the warmth in his sand-blasted cheeks as he let his gaze crawl like a truckling dog across the polished hardwood floor. “I’d best look into a hotel room somewheres . . .”

  “No need for that, Mr. Spurr.”

  He looked up at her as she poured steaming water into a delicate china teapot adorned with painted daffodils. “Say again, ma’am?”

  “You can bed down here, with your friend. At least, I assume you’re friends though under the chloroform Sheriff Mason cursed your name several times.” Mrs. Dickinson gave him that penetrating sidelong glance once more, and her lips spread a bemused half smile as she sprinkled dried tea leaves from a tin canister into the teapot.

  Spurr brushed a gloved hand across his nose. “He did, did he?”

  “Come on in and sit down. There’s only one hotel in Diamondback, and it’s way on the other side of town.”

  Spurr felt like a bull in a china shop, but he couldn’t very well head across town and try to secure a room in the same hotel as the de Cava gang—if they were the de Cava gang, which they likely were. But he could bed down in a livery barn, which was what he’d do when he’d had a rest. His feet were sore from all the walking he’d just done, and the wind was hard on a man with a weak pumper.

  “I reckon I’d have a sip of tea,” he allowed, lowering his rifle and looking around for a place to put it. The house was so neat and orderly and crisply papered and painted, he was worried about damaging something, even of scuffing the floor with his hide-bottomed moccasins.

  “If you’d prefer coffee, it wouldn’t take long . . .”

  He hesitated, finally leaning his rifle in a corner near the front door, holding both hands out in case it slid down the wall, scratching the mauve wallpaper with gold vases of cattails imprinted on it. “No, no—tea’s fine.”

  He strode into the kitchen, making sure not to brush his clothes on the walls or door casing.

  She’d set the teapot on the table covered by a white tablecloth embroidered with red roses and green leaves. Now she went to an open, white cupboard above a dry sink, and pulled down two china cups and saucers that matched the teapot.

  “What brings you to Diamondback, Mr. Spurr?” She looked at him as she carried the cups and saucers to the table and dropped her eyes to the badge on his chest, partly concealed by his vest. “Or is it . . . Marshal Spurr?”

  “Just Spurr’s fine. Thank you, ma’am.” He closed his hand over a chair back but his moccasins seemed glued to the floor. He was staring at the delicate china, hoping against hope he wouldn’t break it. Maybe he should skip the tea, head on over to the livery barn.

  “I reckon law business brought me and the sheriff to your fair town.”

  “Sit down, sit down.” She was pouring tea into one of the cups, holding the lid on with the third finger of her other hand. “Can I ask you what kind of business?”

  “I’d rather not say at the moment.”

  He’d known the woman only a few minutes. He thought he could trust her not to spread the word that he was here, after the de Cava gang, but he hadn’t nearly outlived his ticker by throwing caution to the wind. He slid the chair at one end of the table out carefully and sagged into it even more carefully.

  “I would ask you where you telegraph office is, though, ma’am. I’d like to send a telegram to the soldiers out to Hackberry Creek.”

  “Just south of town, on the other side of the creek. Homer Constiner has a little shack out there that was supposed to be a train depot, when a spur line was considering running a track through Diamondback. Those plans, of course, went the way of the gold, the rain, and everything else out here.”

  Spurr removed his deerskin gloves, set them down beside his cup and saucer, hoping he wasn’t littering the table with too much sand and dust, and wrapped his hand, or as much of it as possible, around the teacup. He lifted it slowly to his lips.

  He couldn’t remember if he’d ever drunk from any vessel as small and delicate as this. When in hell would he have had the opportunity? He didn’t care for it. In fact, as he lifted the steaming brew to his lips, he felt himself growing irritated that anyone would fashion a cup so small and obviously fragile.

  Wasn’t life, for chrissakes, difficult enough?

  He tried to close his upper lip over the rim of the cup but his mustache got in the way. He hadn’t trimmed it in a month of Sundays so it had become a soup-strainer without his knowing.

  “Christ,” he grumbled, glancing over the cup at the woman sitting across from him.

  She was watching him, a bemused twinkle in her large, brown eyes.

  “Uh . . . sorry.”

  “I do apologize for the cup, Spurr.”

  “It’s no problem.” He applied a little more pressure to push the rim between his lips, and drew about a half-teaspoon of the tea into his mouth, let the sour-tasting brew roll back over his tongue, and swallowed. “Ooh,” he said, smacking his lips. “That’s right good.”

  “I’d be happy to make you a cup of coffee.”

  “No, it’s good.”

  Spurr took another sip and set the cup back down in the saucer, wincing at the too-loud clink of china on china.

  The woman was gazing at him obliquely over the rim of her own cup, which she held in both her fine hands, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. To break the pause, he looked around the kitchen that appeared bright, clean, and happy despite the dull gray-tan light angling through the room’s two windows that the wind rattled in their frames. “You live all alone here, eh? Do all the doctorin’ by your lonesome?”

  Mrs. Dickinson nodded as she swallowed a sip of her tea and set the cup down in its saucer. “The house isn’t worth much here, I’m afraid. I’ll hold on to it as long as I can. As long as there is some doctoring to do. I’ve had to cut my expenses since my husband died, of course, but I’m comfortable here. I do have some family in Ohio, but all those I was close to are now passed.”

  She’d said it very matter-of-factly, without a trace of self-pity. Spurr was cheered by the warmth in the woman’s pretty eyes. She smoothed out a small wrinkle in the tablecloth with her right hand and gave him something close to a shy smile. “Do you have a woman, Spurr?”

  “Me?” Spurr said. “Nah. No woman.” He thought of Abilene, but he didn’t consider her his. She belonged to no man, and that’s how he liked it. That’s probably how he would like it even after they both went to Mexico together, if they ever got that far. “Oh, I been married. Three times, in fact. It wasn’t right for me, ma’am.”

  “How long have you been marshaling?”

  “Longer than I care to remember. Soon done, though. After this here . . . well, after I head back to Denver, I’m gonna turn this hunk of copper in to my boss, Chief Marshal Henry Brackett, collect my time, and head south with a gal I know. If’n she’ll ride with me. I think she will, but . . .” He chuckled wryly. “Women are notional.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Well, maybe you aren’t,” he said, backing water.

  “Oh, no—I am, too.” She sipped her tea once more and favored him with a penetrating stare that fairly seared his own, wind-burned eyes. “And this is my current notion, marshal. Why don�
�t you let me heat water so you can take a bath and get some of that trail dust and grime off of you. And then I’ll make you supper, and you can spend the night right here, in my spare bedroom. It’s all very neat and clean, and the mattress is stuffed with goose down. It’s been slept in maybe a total of three times.”

  She let her voice trail off when she saw the curious cast to Spurr’s own, lilac-blue gaze. Lowering her own eyes demurely, she ran her hand over the wrinkle in the tablecloth again, and said, “I don’t mean to be forward, Marshal. I’ll admit it gets lonely here. I do miss the ministrations of a strong man. The touch and the warmth of a strong man. But I am not a charlatan.”

  She lifted her eyes to his once more, and there was a boldness and sincerity there, as well as a haunting sort of mad lonesomeness, that was like a razor-edged knife poking the backside of Spurr’s heart. He was buoyed, however, by her seeing him as strong.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Spurr said in genuine disbelief, a boyish embarrassment touching his cheeks again with warm irons. “Ma’am, I ain’t all that strong. Not anymore I ain’t. But I sure never been so charmed, and I sure ain’t up to refusin’ a beautiful woman’s offer of lodging.” He arched a brow. “That said, I am a stranger to you, Mrs. Dickinson. Are you sure . . . ?”

  “If a woman can’t trust a man with a badge, who can she trust?”

  Spurr stared at her fine-boned hands. On her right hand, she still wore a gold wedding band. He lifted his gaze to her full bosom, which heaved against her dress, pulling the material so taut that it puckered along the sides of her breasts, beneath her arms.

  Spurr leaned back to reach into his pants pocket.

  She stretched a waylaying hand on the table between them. “I certainly want no money from you . . . aside from what you owe me for doctoring your friend in there. I suspect from the coin I found in his pockets, he’ll be paying for that himself.”

  She sat back in her chair, drawing a deep breath that lifted her bosom again. “Shall I get started on that bath?”

  “No, ma’am.” Spurr had taken another sip of his tea, which was beginning to taste better, and set the cup back down in its saucer with both hands. “I gotta go find the telegraph office, send a telegram to Hackberry Creek.”

  She was looking at him, faintly incredulous, skeptical.

  Spurr smiled warmly and winked. “Then I’ll be back for that bath and them vittles.” He slid his chair back and rose, grabbing his hat off the table. “Don’t look like the storm’s gonna let up any time soon, an’ I figure I can keep an eye on the town from here as well as anywhere.”

  “You don’t think me brazen, inviting a strange man into my house?”

  “Brazen? I find you nothing less than a saint, Mrs. Dickinson.”

  “I reckon you might as well call me June, Spurr.”

  “June,” Spurr said with a smile. “I like that. See you in an hour or so, June.”

  He turned reluctantly away from the woman, grabbed his rifle, and left.

  25

  AS JUNE HAD said it would be, the telegraph office sat on the far side of the creek from Diamondback, just east of a sprawling, dead cottonwood.

  It was an unpainted shack of rough lumber and a shake roof, several of the shakes appearing to have been blown away by the wind. Several others fluttered like paper as Spurr approached, tramping across the crude pine bridge traversing the creekbed.

  Spurr had figured the creek would be dry, but several inches of adobe-colored water swirled down it. He looked upstream, to the west, and beyond the flying grit he saw that a bank of charcoal clouds edged with cottony gray had settled over the Organ Range. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed wanly.

  Spurr stopped to consider the storm, which, judging by the direction of the wind, was moving toward Diamondback. The chill air was spiced with the smell of sage and brimstone. That deluge would likely be upon the town in an hour or so.

  That would keep the de Cava bunch sitting tight. The problem was it would probably also keep Captain Wilson hunkered down at his Hackberry Creek outpost.

  There was a cracking sound. Like a gunshot, ripped and torn and nearly drowned by the gale. Spurr jerked his head toward the telegraph office.

  Realizing the shot had come from the little shack off both ends of which telegraph wires trailed away on tall pine poles, he dropped to one knee on the plankboard bridge. An especially heavy gust of wind blew up dust and sand in front of him, momentarily blotting the unpainted shack from his view.

  He closed his eyes against the grit, and lowered his head, wincing and muttering curses.

  When the gust relented, he looked at the shack again. There was only the shack and the blowing dust and tumbleweeds and the whipping telegraph wire. He saw no one around. Pushing up off his knee with a grunt, he broke into a shamble-footed stride, crouching and holding his Winchester up high across his chest. Weaving around boulders and rabbitbrush and sage clumps, he gained the building’s west wall, pressed his shoulder against it. He looked ahead and behind him, making sure no one had gotten around him, then strode cautiously up to the shack’s west front corner.

  He took a second to listen for any unnatural sounds emanating from inside the shack or in front of it, then stepped out away from the corner, bringing his Winchester’s barrel to bear on the unroofed stoop running along the south wall.

  Nothing.

  Only, now the telegraph wire was sagging from a post that stood about twenty feet off the shack’s far side.

  “Well, I’ll be a shit-house rat.”

  Spurr stood gaping at the sagging cable that was buffeted by the chill wind. He looked around wildly, swinging his rifle’s barrel around, as well. It was as though a ghost riding the teeth of the wind had cut the wire. For a moment, he wondered if indeed the cable had been cut by the wind. Then he walked over to it, pinned the end down with a moccasin, and inspected it.

  A clean slice that had undoubtedly been made by a large wire cutter.

  Spurr looked toward town, then jerked his rifle up once more. Three vague figures were striding away from him—dark shadows wavering amidst the veils of blowing sand and growing gradually smaller as they crossed another bridge, heading toward Diamondback. One was wearing a duster, which flapped wildly about his legs.

  Flickering in and out of the sand curtains, the three figures were finally swallowed by the storm. Spurr lowered his rifle and looked down once more at the cut cable.

  “You bastards,” he said, running a gloved hand across his bearded cheek. “Now, why in the hell did you have to go and do that?”

  That was all right, Spurr thought, hope rising in him. He’d spliced cut telegraph wire before. Indians were forever cutting telegraph wire. If he could climb that pine post, which might not be so easy now in his later years, he could repair the wire and get the telegraph operational again.

  If he could climb that damn post . . .

  He remembered the gun crack. Raising the Winchester once more, he strode on back to the door of the telegraph shack.

  The door was open, swinging back and forth in the wind. Sand and bits of tumbleweeds lay strewn across the crude wood puncheons just beyond the doorjam. A man lay there, as well. An older gent in a wash-yellowed dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up his freckled arms, and brown wool broadcloth trousers. He wore armbands and a green eyeshade. He had a pale, craggy face with a pencil-thin mustache and a chin like the mouth of a whiskey bottle.

  He also wore a bloody hole in the middle of his chest. Blood was pooling on the floor around him. His sightless, wide-open eyes stared at the low ceiling. His teeth were gritted, his jaws clenched as though against the death that was consuming him.

  Had comsumed him. He lay perfectly still.

  A cat meowed from somewhere back in the room’s shadows. It sounded loud in the quiet building despite the wind’s howling outside, and Spurr jerked his head and rifle up, his heart thudding irregularly.

  “Shit, pussy. Don’t do that to ole Spurr.”

  He mov
ed forward and stepped away from the door, habitually wary, so that the outside light wouldn’t silhouette him. He couldn’t see the cat until he’d moved a ways into the shed, toward a cage and wicket that stood on the shack’s opposite side.

  The liver-colored cat sat atop the narrow counter running along the front of the cage, hunkered down and curling its tail anxiously, its yellow eyes glowing. It was a fat cat, well fed. It had probably belonged to poor, dead Constiner, who’d been killed most likely only because he’d been Diamondback’s telegrapher and he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killers had wanted to cut the telegraph wires, and they hadn’t wanted anyone in town knowing about it.

  Why?

  Speculation careened haplessly across Spurr’s brain as he looked around the small shack outfitted with a charcoal brazier and a rocking chair in a corner, a knitted afghan draped over the back of the chair. There was a half-eaten sandwich, glass of milk, and small whiskey flask on a table beside the chair, with a saucer of milk on the floor beneath the table.

  The telegrapher’s cage was outfitted with a small desk and a small filing cabinet. The telegraph key sat on a small, tin table against a dirty sashed window in the outside wall.

  A yellow-covered codebook sat beside the key, which had been smashed all to hell by the outlaws so that it was hardly recognizable. Springs and weights from the badly smashed instrument were spread out across the codebook and on the floor all around the cage.

  So much for sending a telegraph. He could possibly repair the cable, but the key was finished. And he doubted Diamondback had any spare ones lying around.

  The cat meowed again. Spur turned to it. It jumped off the counter, hitting the floor with a soft thud, then hurried over to the dead man on the floor and, curling its tail, sniffed the man’s forehead. It sniffed the blood, as well, then gave a baleful yowl and padded back over to the counter, pressing its side against it and curling its tail up high above its head.