“And from there…?” Curtis questioned, striking a sulfur match.
“From there,” the old man said, smiling. “I do not know?”
Bardwell nodded his thanks, putting spur to his mount. The lawmen galloped to the west before the sun had risen under a brilliant pink morning sky.
Chapter Seventeen
When the sun had fully risen into what promised to be another warm desert day, the lawmen sat in the rocks high above and far to the west of the once great city, Arroyo de las Vegas. No one would venture this far out into the wilds looking for them. No one would know what direction to search if they dared.
Ahead in the high mountains, they could expect plenty of good feed for the animals, cool clean running water, and game to eat along the way. It would be three weeks or better before they saw their home state of Sacramento again, but they were each glad to be traveling toward that goal.
The boy—Franklin Curtis—had alluded to the lawman being bulletproof and just maybe he was. If Bardwell were bulletproof, then the young tin star lawman was now also.
Officer Daniel Bardwell of the Sacramento Tin Star knew that somewhere out there a bullet had his name on it, but for now…well…
“How long you think it’s going to take before we make it home?” Curtis asked, from under his black hat. The stub of a cigar burned just inches from his face.
Bardwell spit taking in the high mountain range in the distance. “I reckon three weeks, maybe more?”
“Any little towns along the way,” Curtis asked
“No,” Bardwell said.
“That’s too bad, Sir,” Curtis said.
“Why’s that?” Bardwell asked.
The boy smiled drawing on his cigar. “You know, the sight of us riding through town would dispel any rumor,” he said.
“And just what rumor is that?” Bardwell asked, laughing.
“That there ain’t no law in California.”
The Final Solution the elders had written in the letters of old of their nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Two gunmen, two cowboys with their twitching fingers on the trigger standing in the one dusty lane through town at high noon, neither man flinching, the undertaker with a smile on his face and buzzards circling high overhead in a cloudless blue western sky.
The sight of the two cowboys—the two Tin Star lawmen—riding through would dispel the rumors. There ain’t no law in California.
Chapter Eighteen
The late day sun was dropping down into a dirty western sky like kids skipping rock out across the lake, tired and spent. Two tin star lawmen were closing in on home after trailing a trio of the lawless down across the borderlands to the south and then over to Arroyo de las Vegas—the capital of the New Mexico territories.
A great divide, the Sierra Nevada Mountain range was all that stood between the weary travelers and their home state of Sacramento.
Ahead just past the low range of hills bordering the Sierra’s to the west, the outline of a few small buildings could be seen not far in the distance. A smoky haze hung over the great valley this time of the year due to the lightning-caused fire that would burn out come the winter snow.
It had been two weeks in getting away from the desert settlement the elders had once called sin city. After a long drawn out night there, the lawmen understood how the name had come about, with its games of chance and Opium dens. The very dregs of humanity it seemed.
“How long you think, Sir?” Curtis asked.
“Two hours maybe,” Bardwell said, removing his timepiece for a nervous glance. The daystar glinted from the polished silver.
“That’s Valencia,” Curtis asked, riding alongside Bardwell’s unsaddled spare. “Right…?”
“Yes, Son,” the lawman said, spitting over the side. For the past week, the lawmen had enjoyed a brief break from the heat crossing the range. As they descended lower, down to the valley floor, the temperatures climbed like a wayward angel. It was hot here in the western state of Sacramento.
A hundred and fifty or so years previous tensions had escalated between a few of the world’s powers. The Cold War, they had called it then. For so long it had been the classic tale of two lawless cowboys standing in the one dusty lane leading through town at high noon with a twitching finger on the trigger and nothing but their conscience to stop them. Call it their upbringing maybe, the little voice in the back of their head, but they remained in that dusty street with the local folk peering through dirty, bubbled glass windows fearing for their safety.
As time went on, more and more of those cowboys—snot nosed brats really—came on the scene. Some chose one side and of course, some chose the other. Some chose not to pick sides at all and go it alone. It was the newcomers to the showdown that tossed fuel on the fire.
Like any schoolyard bullies, the new entrants picked their side and looked to their leader for direction. Those two—the original of the bunch—continued to stand with their eyes drawn in narrow slits staring down the other. No one flinched.
As more and more came into the dirty street called Damnation Alley, some of those gunfighters went rogue. There was no leadership among these men, no alliances, and no reason to conform. Some held a different set of religious beliefs, for others it was a better place in the world pecking order that they struggled for.
Feeling pushed around and tired of it, some of those new entrants on the world stage set about to playing a dangerous game. A game that they simply couldn’t win once it got started in earnest, a game that would wipe most of humanity from the earth with a push of the button.
Like any gunfight—no matter where or when it takes place—there is no bringing the bullet back once it leaves the muzzle of the barrel and start its course. The man standing behind the trigger is required to live with the consequences of his decision.
Russia, China, and the United States had the most to lose if things escalated to that point of no return. The new, smaller entrants didn’t much care. Whether it was prestige or religious beliefs that they perused, they hadn’t thought every possible outcome through.
In the days of the two cowboys facing each other down under a white-hot sun and cloudless blue western sky, one man would die and one would walk away to fight another day. Unlike those cowboys, in the nuclear arms race, no one would walk away. Everyone would die.
One day, one of those cowboys—a small player on the world stage—pulled his trigger, touching off a firestorm of hell and destruction that even Lucifer himself couldn’t have contemplated. In less than an hour, Moscow, Washington, and Beijing lay in ruins. India, Pakistan, and North Korea took the brunt of it—once the shooting started, parts of Russia, the United States, and China surviving.
As the survivors crawled back out into the world, they began to rebuild what had once been with various tribes and clans coalescing into small villages that grew over time into new forms of government.
Valencia was just one of those little towns along the eastern side of the great valley in the place once known as California. Citrus grew well there in the hills of the new state of Sacramento.
“You reckon that we can stay on for a day or two, Sir?” Curtis asked, taking in the roofline of the village as they drew closer.
“Yeah,” Bardwell said. “I don’t know about you, Son, but I’m looking forward to a hot bath and a shave, good whiskey, and a night in a good bed?”
Curtis struck a sulfur match and put the flame to the stub of a cigar clamped down his mouth. “Me too, Sir,” he said. “It seems like we’ve been away for the longest time.”
“We have been,” Bardwell said. “I left home six weeks ago or better?”
“I could use some smokes,” the younger lawman said.
Bardwell nodded his agreement. “I hear you,” he said. “I ran out of tobacco leaving out this morning.”
The lawmen had departed the desert city of Arroyo de las Vegas on a tear not really knowing if they would be pursued or not. As luck would have it, no one followed, b
ut they didn’t have the chance to refit with supplies to make the mountain crossing.
Bardwell stepped onto ground just as the sun was dropping behind a range still closer to the Pacific, fifteen rods or better to the west.
“You fellows be staying in town long, Mister?” the stable boy asked, taking the lead rope from the unsaddled horse as Bardwell and Curtis unsaddled their mounts.
Bardwell smiled handing the boy a piece or two of silver and slinging his worn leather saddlebags and the Colts over his shoulder. “A day or two anyway,” he said. “You see to it that they get all they want to eat boy. The Lord knows all three of them have earned it.”
“I will, Mister,” the boy said, watching as the two tin star lawmen walked into town. It wasn’t often that a person could get a glimpse of the five-pointed Sacramento star.
The smells of good Mexican cooking filled the one street through town. Situated as it was, the little town offered anything the lawmen could want within a short walk of where they now were.
Two rooms were secured at the boarding house and their belongings stashed after leaving their change of clothes with a laundress to tend. A hot bath and an even hotter meal later, the pair sat at the bar drinking good whiskey for the night
After some of the places that the two lawmen had visited over the past few months, Valencia’s Silver Dollar saloon was a Godsend in the peaceful little community.
“How’ve things been, Bose?” Bardwell asked the barkeep. It had been a time since the lawman had been here in town, maybe a year or better. He knew things hadn’t changed much in Valencia since the last time that he’d been there.
“Oh,” the barkeep answered. “It’s been about the same, Dan.” The barkeep slung his towel up over his shoulder. “Been seeing a little trouble now and then,” he continued. “Got some of the rough sort paying us a visit from time to time.”
It was the same in every one of these little towns along the east side of the valley. The more that they prospered, the more they became the target of holdups and shootouts from the bandits and Mexican desperadoes that frequented the highways of old.
“Is that so, Bose?” Bardwell asked, sliding his glass forward for a refill. The lawman had survived on poorly made rotgut booze for most of the last two months this here was good whiskey.
“Just last week,” the barkeep continued matter-of-fact. “We had a couple of bad ones here in town raising hell and a bunch the week before that.”
“They do any damage?” Curtis asked.
“Oh,” the barkeep said. “They broke a few windows, made off with a few dollars in silver. Just scared the hell out of folks mostly, I reckon?”
“No one hurt, huh?” Bardwell asked, sipping from his glass and thinking some about what the bartender had said.
The barkeep shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ve been damned lucky so far. Mister Broquet over at the livery lost a couple of horses to some bandits a few days back, but that was about it.”
Curtis nodded.
“That’s a hanging offense,” the barkeep mentioned casually. “From what I understand, stealing horses?”
“Yes, Sir,” Curtis said. “It is.”
Bardwell nodded his agreement thinking back on the horse thieves that he and the boy had tracked out across the badlands a few years back. That must have been one of the boy’s first trips out after they pinned that tin star to his chest.
“You remember when we chased them two rascals south of the borderlands?” Curtis asked, remembering also. It was okay to remember sitting here in the peaceful little town as they were. The sun was down and there was no trouble on the horizon.
“I do,” Bardwell said, smiling. “That was Lonnie ‘Bad Eye’ Jacobson and Silas Moss if I remember right? His pard’s called him Happy?”
“That man was anything but happy,” Curtis said, laughing now that it was well behind them.
Bardwell chuckled.
There were few left in the Silver Dollar at this hour. “So what happened with these two rascals?” the barkeep asked.
Curtis started into the story. “Jacobson and this Moss,” he said. “Figured they needed a string of horses to keep ‘em up down in the New Mexico territories.”
The barkeep nodded his understanding of the story so far. “How far did you gentlemen have to give chase before you caught up with them?” he asked.
“Just south of the border,” Curtis said. “We rode hard for three days to head them off. It was in the mountains down about Fort Tejon where I wrote my first name in the book of souls.”
“Book of souls?” the barkeep asked. Bose Mitchell leaned back against the bar having a sip of the good whiskey that he was known in these parts for.
“It’s not really a book at all,” Curtis said, still rambling on with his story. “Literally speaking, it’s the book where those that have fallen to our gun are registered.”
The barkeep looked to Bardwell who had so far refrained from the story. Bardwell nodded his agreement with what the boy had said.
“So how many do have written in this book of souls, as you call it?” Mitchell, the barkeep, asked.
Without hesitation, Curtis shot back, “A hundred and thirty-seven if you count those drug using zombies.”
“You mean to tell me that you’ve killed a hundred and thirty-seven men in your young life?” the barkeep asked, not believing what the boy was telling.
“That was just from the last trip,” Curtis said, with an air of bravado ringing in his voice, maybe it was the whiskey starting to talk.
“A hundred and thirty-seven men died at your hand during this last ride?” the barkeep asked for clarification.
“Like I said,” Curtis went on. “It was all zombies. This man here got the bad guys, Wyman Maddox, Marion Holderman, and Parle Deville.”
“Is that so?” the barkeep asked, pouring their glasses full.
Bardwell only nodded agreement and had another sip. Although bullshit, for the most part, there was some truth in this book of souls the young lawman—and the others like him—spoke of. Today the younger generation of law enforcement officers only talked of the mythical book the gentlemen wearing the five-pointed Tin Star of Sacramento carried. The older lawman smiled, he was from a different generation, a dying breed. Dan Bardwell was from a time when a lawman did have a book of souls secreted away in his saddlebags that contained the name of every man that he had killed in the line of duty.
Although the idea started a hundred years or better ago out of respect for those that had been killed some of the veteran officers continued the tradition even today.
“Well,” the boy said. “Maddox was left to die on his own to pay for his sins, but the other two got a bullet for their troubles.”
“A lot of folks smoking the long grass down that way,” the barkeep asked. “Down there, south of the border?”
“And worse,” Curtis said. “Mister, you can’t imagine how they’re living if you ain’t never seen it for yourself.”
The bartender smiled. “I ain’t never been any further south than Tulare,” he said, leaning against the polished wood bar.
What had once been known as California was now called Sacramento. An imaginary border ran across the state just above the capital city in the north out across the Sierra’s encompassing Reno and Carson City, then down the eastern side of the range only to cut back toward the Pacific just south of the Tulare settlement.
From there south was the borderlands, a place where bad things could happen to a man if he were not careful.
“So tell me about these horse thieves that you cornered down south?” Mitchell asked.
Curtis turned up his glass, happy to be at home in Sacramento for the time, and went on with his story. “We figured that it was a setup…” he said.
“A setup,” Mitchell asked.
“Yes,” Curtis said. “Jacobson and Moss worked for a rancher by the name of Dick Walker. He raised mutant cattle down along the borderlands. Now Walker had felt that he w
as getting the short end of the stick when it came to the rights and protection that the state was providing. After two or three of his cowboys came up dead, he started agitating that it was the lawmen up in Sacramento that had killed them.”
“So why steal a string of horses?” Mitchell asked.
“Walker knew that if his men stole the horses,” Curtis said. “Sacramento would be forced to send a lawman or two to bring them back.”
Bose Mitchell nodded following along. “And they sent the two of you?”
“Exactly,” Curtis said. “They sent me out to Dan’s place with a note advising of the situation with Jacobson and Moss. Said that they wanted their best men after these two?”
Bardwell had been happy to listen this far. Now he spoke up correcting the boy. “Their best man,” he said, turning up his glass.
The barkeep filled them again and looked back to the boy.
“Well,” he said. “Their best man, but I was up and coming and they knew it. That’s why they sent me out to get him.”
“So did the two of you ride out after those rascals right then?” Mitchell asked. It was a valid question.
“No,” Curtis said, fueled now on good whiskey. “Said that we’d start out the next morning?”
“The sun was nearly down when you finally found me,” Bardwell said. “ It wouldn’t do any good to strike out and ride for an hour or less.”
Chapter Nineteen
The day started for the two lawmen from Sacramento well before the daystar had risen. Bardwell’s little place in the hills was nothing but a memory when the two rode the dusty lane leading through Stockton in pursuit of the horse thieves they were after.
Bardwell was packed light and on a good mount. Two converted Colt pistols at his side and two more across the saddle horn, the lawman had a Winchester long rifle in a scabbard under his leg. The old tin star lawman carried nothing more than hard bread and tobacco in his saddlebags and a can to boil coffee. A tattered old wool blanket tied behind his saddle finished off the rig.
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