Last Car For This Time

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Last Car for this Time

  A Duster Kendal Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Last Car for this Time

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Mirek Hejnicki/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Last Car for this Time

  A Duster Kendal Story

  Chapter One

  Marshal “Duster” Kendal really had no great desire to see the death scene. He stepped off the wooden porch of the Dewey Hotel and moved his six-foot frame as slow as he could down the dry dirt of the Main Street of the tiny town of Dewey, Idaho. With each step his boots kicked up a small cloud into the hot, morning air.

  Lately he’d seen far too many deaths and he had a hunch this one wouldn’t look much different than the other two he’d seen here and others he’d seen over the last year.

  Things seemed to be unraveling. He knew the signs.

  This time he had met the dead guy two nights before in the Benson Saloon in Silver City. It was one thing to see a body of a stranger. Another to look on the dead face of a man Duster had watched poor drinks for two hours.

  The morning sun beat down through the clear August sky with such force, Duster could almost feel it like a weight on his shoulders, pressing him down into the dirt of the street. The day would be a scorcher before it was finished.

  People thought him odd to wear his light, oilcloth duster even on hot summer days, but he had learned while in the Arizona territory a long, long time ago that it actually kept him cooler in the hot sun. His wide-brimmed Texas cowhand hat kept the sun off his face as well.

  Wearing the long, brown coat had gotten him the nickname “Duster” and he had no intention of changing that now. He actually had grown to like the name and the coat. Both fit him like a comfortable old pair of boots.

  He wore his gray and brown hair long and streaming out the back of his hat to cover his neck and his face and chiseled features gave away very little of his actual age, which was north of forty-five now. Only his bright green eyes let his intelligence shine through and he was known for the intensity of his gaze. Sometimes he could stare a man down enough to kill a growing problem.

  Today he had no plan on being out in the sun much longer than he needed. If this death followed the pattern of the others, he wouldn’t need to be out long.

  And this morning just maybe he might figure out what was causing these men to die.

  Or at least why.

  He had a hunch he knew, and with no train due back in the valley for six days, he had time to find out if his hunch was right and set everything on the correct path again.

  In his years of wearing a badge, he’d never seen anything quite like this. Of course, no place else in the west, or in the world for that matter, was like the Owyhee Mountains. They had been mostly ignored by the huge rush on the Oregon Trail close by in the 1860s and if it hadn’t been for the gold found in the streams and deep veins here, Duster doubted anyone would be in this hostile place.

  And if no one had come here, he wouldn’t be here either.

  These deaths by train were the reason he was up here from Boise in the mining district of Silver City. The only law in the valley was a constable in Silver City named Ben and his deputy. The poor guy had called for help after the first death. Ben’s job was to break up bar fights, not figure out why someone died under the wheels of a train.

  What bothered Duster even more was that there didn’t seem to be anything going on in the town that would cause this. No fights beyond drunken brawls, no mine-labor disputes beyond normal. Yet four men in three weeks had been run over by slow-moving freight trains just down the hill from Dewey, Idaho.

  Dewey was a silver-and-gold-mining boomtown tucked in the bottom of a valley leading up between War Eagle and Florida Mountains in the Owyhee Mountain Range in Southern Idaho. The town straddled Jordon Creek like it couldn’t decide which way to step.

  The main attraction of the town beside the huge twenty-stamp ore mill and the Blaine tunnel was the Dewey Hotel. Colonel Dewey had built the hotel tucked up against the west side of the narrow valley. Two stories and as plush as anything Duster had seen in San Francisco or back east. Colonel Dewey himself lived in a large house beside the hotel and seemed just as upset at all the deaths as everyone.

  Maybe more. Colonel Dewey had brought in the railroad in the first place. He knew that if the deaths didn’t stop soon, there wouldn’t be a person left in the valley to work his mines. This was scaring everyone and Colonel Dewey had offered Duster extra to solve this fast.

  Duster had turned him down, of course.

  If Colonel Dewey actually knew how fantastically rich Duster was, and where he actually came from, he would have never offered. But Duster played the roll of marshal well, even though he always stayed in the best hotels when he traveled and only ate at the best restaurants and drank the finest brandy.

  Duster felt that just because he worked as a marshal didn’t mean he couldn’t fully live life as well. And no one really questioned the money he spent and he didn’t offer an explanation.

  The railroad had put a spur line up the valley to the Dewey Mill in 1881. All the oar from Silver City and all the mines farther up either had to be hauled out over forty miles by wagon down to Murphy or taken the short three miles down to Dewey in the summer months when the train could get up the valley. In a few months the snow would start flying and the train wouldn’t return until late spring.

  If it returned then.

  The town of Dewey was dying. Duster had seen it before around the west. Towns sprang up and then vanished, often within years. In a hundred plus years there wouldn’t be anything left here but a bend in the road.

  Silver City, the county seat three miles up Jordon Creek above Dewey wasn’t in much better shape. He had no doubt that the winter would kill most everything in this valley and the mines that were marginal wouldn’t open again. And after the snow started flying the train wouldn’t be back.

  Plus, with the Bank of California going down a few years back and payrolls for most of the mines in this area being lost, people were already not trusting anyone.

  The valley had a few more generations in it as it slowly died, but not much beyond that.

  And now the deaths of four good men weren’t helping.

  This area was about to go down and would become a ghost town.

  Duster just needed to figure out why people kept dying under the wheels of slow-moving oar cars so he could get back to his wonderful suite in the luxurious Boise Hotel.

  He really wanted to get back to the life he had picked and the restaurants and the women in Boise as well. Everyone knew how Duster loved his food and his friends wondered how he could eat so much and stay so rail thin. He had his secrets he would say.

  Duster had a lot of secrets.

  Chapter Two

  Duster kept trudging down the street thinking about the deaths. None of this made a lick of sense. If someone wanted to drive people out of the valley ahead of when they would naturally leave, what would they gain besides changing the natural history of this valley? The mines were pinching off. The death of this valley was only a matter of time, so these deaths couldn’t be about that.

  Duster walked past the big mill and dow
n the rail line to where a group of bystanders gathered near the edge of the almost-dry creek across from the tracks.

  Just as with the others before, this body wasn’t a pretty sight.

  The head and upper torso were on one side of the track, the waist and legs on the other. The train had pretty much cut old Benny in half, leaving his toes pointing down and a stunned look on Benny’s face as he stared with blank eyes at the morning sky.

  Benny had to be at least fifty and his face and hands showed many rough years in the mines.

  The blood had stained the rock fill around the ties slightly darker than normal for about ten feet along the track. No telling which stains were Benny’s and which were from the other three men. All of them had died in the same place.

  The train had left parts of Benny’s guts strung out along the rail. That smelled just downright awful, like an overfull outhouse baking in the afternoon heat. The nasty odor had kept the gawkers back a distance. And the hot morning sun wasn’t helping matters.

  Duster had no desire or need to go any closer, so he stopped about twenty paces away and just studied the scene. He knew what he would find if he went in closer. Nothing.

  The same as every man who had died before Benny in the same spot in the same way.

  Benny wouldn’t have a mark on him. And no ropes had held him in place under the train. And the railroad men wouldn’t have seen him on the tracks when they walked the train before starting down the valley.

  Somehow Benny had gotten under the car on the tracks in broad daylight just as the train started.

  And without anyone seeing him.

  Then he had turned face up and let the train cut him in half.

  What a horrid way to die.

  Duster shook his head and turned to look at the silent crowd.

  “Marshal,” one man said, fear clearly in his eyes. And some anger as well. “When is the great Duster Kendal going to stop this?”

  “Yeah,” another guy said. “I got a family that’s starting to get spooked.”

  “They should have gotten worried after the first one,” Duster said, glaring at the man. “Someone wants all of us to be scared. Seems to me it’s working just fine.”

  Duster watched the faces of the twenty people, watched their eyes in the hot sun. Not a one of them seemed satisfied at what he had said. All showed fear.

  Damn. He shook his head and turned away from the crowd. It would have been too easy to have the murderer standing around watching. He hadn’t been in the crowd at the previous murder either and that had been larger. This was happening so often now, fewer and fewer people were going out to look and stand in the odor of a man’s guts cut open and baking in the hot sun.

  Duster turned and headed back up the road toward the hotel and the bar there. He had four men to meet and if luck held, they would have his answer.

  He just didn’t want to hear what he was afraid it might be.

  This all might be his fault.

  Chapter Three

  The air felt cooler inside the hotel and out of the hot sun.

  Duster pulled off his hat and coat and carried them into the bar over his left arm, his right arm free to reach for his gun on his hip. Over the decades he had become one of the most accurate shots with a Colt around. Luckily, he seldom had to use that skill.

  The bar smelled of cigar smoke and a faint odor of puke. None of the windows were open yet, trying to hold off the heat of the day as long as possible.

  The four men were sitting at the bar, clearly drinking and not talking, their heads down. He motioned for them to follow him and he went out and into the dining room and to a large table in the back.

  The dining room was even cooler since the drapes were pulled closed and it still smelled of the breakfast bacon. It was empty.

  Bonnie, a middle-aged woman with a bright smile and bright red hair saw him coming and got up from where she was reading the Silver Avalanche paper. Her blue dress had been protected from a couple of morning spills by a stained apron tied around her neck and her waist. Her wonderful brown eyes looked very, very worried.

  She looked as good as always. He had known Bonnie for a very long time and every time he saw her, his heart skipped a beat. Being in love with Bonnie was a normal thing for him.

  And lately he had been missing her a lot. More than he wanted to admit to even himself.

  “Another one, Marshal?” she asked standing across the table from him, her smooth hands on the back of the chair.

  Duster nodded. “Not anything you’d want to see.”

  She shook her head, worry and fear filling her eyes. “You think it might be against us?”

  “It might be,” Duster said, nodding. “I’m about to find out for sure. Could I get a big glass of water if you wouldn’t mind? Actually, make that two and add a couple chips of ice.”

  “Never a problem for you, Marshal,” she said, smiling and turning as the four men followed him into the room carrying their drinks from the bar.

  She would have to go down into the cellar to where they stored the ice from the winter, and it would cost him, but after that walk in the sun, it would be worth it.

  And he tipped well. Everyone in the valley knew he tipped well. It got him a lot of extras he didn’t even ask for.

  Bonnie knew a lot more about him than that as well, but in public they stayed in their parts, their lives.

  The four men pulled out chairs and sat at the table with him, their eyes down, trying to find the bottom of their shots of whiskey like there were answers there, clearly not liking what they had to report to him.

  He had stationed the four men on the hillsides above the parked oar train, two on one hillside, two on the other. He had paid them all good money to stay out there from sunset last night until the train moved this morning. Where they had been on the hillsides, all four of them should have seen the death.

  “So what happened?” Duster asked.

  Not a word as all four stared at their drinks. These men were miners, rough men, strong men, able to handle the dangers of deep rock tunnels, yet all four were afraid to talk at that very moment.

  He didn’t blame them. They were good men, not men used to seeing things that they didn’t understand. They had all seen death, he knew that. But how this death had happened they weren’t used to seeing and that was what was bothering them.

  They didn’t think he would believe what they had seen and then be mad at them and maybe even blame them.

  The silence in the dining room was broken by Bonnie coming back and bringing Duster his two large tumblers of ice water. The water was naturally cold from the spring up the hill above the hotel, but the ice made it even better.

  “Thanks,” he said to Bonnie, then took a long swig out of one. Then he pressed the sweating cold glass against his forehead.

  That felt wonderful. It had been even hotter out there than he had thought.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped off his face, then took another drink.

  All the while the four big miners sat silently, not even bothering to take a drink of their whisky shots.

  “Well,” he finally said as Bonnie moved back over to her paper. She could hear from there clearly, which was good. She would need to know if this was what he thought it was.

  “You wouldn’t believe us, Marshal,” Dave Jennings said and the other three nodded, not looking up.

  Duster decided to just let them off the hook. “Benny just appeared on the tracks, right before he was ran over. No one put him there. Am I correct?”

  All four of the miner’s heads snapped up to look at him like he had lost a screw.

  “That’s right,” Dave said. “One second he wasn’t there and I thought nothing would happen and the next moment he was on the tracks and the train was running him through like so much soft butter on a hot day. That vision will haunt my dreams, let me tell ya, Marshal.”

  The other men nodded in agreement, clearly seeing again what had happened out there on thos
e tracks.

  “I was afraid of that,” Duster said, sighing. Damn it all, he had just settled into a nice routine in Boise.

  He glanced over at Bonnie who was just shaking her head as well. She knew they were in trouble.

  He reached into his breast pocket and took out four gold coins, each coin the equivalent of two-weeks work in the mines for these men. He had already paid them an equal amount for their nights’ watch, but now he had to buy their silence, let things get back to normal here.

  He slid one coin each to the men. “This is to get you to forget what you saw and not mention it to anyone.”

  All four looked at him with a puzzled look.

  “I don’t think anyone would believe us even if we wanted to speak, Marshal,” Dave said, picking up the coin and looking at it.

  “There is another just like that for each of you if I don’t hear a word of what you saw for the next month. Understand? Not even a rumor.”

  All four nodded.

  Good, that would give things time to calm and change and be forgotten and winter would be that much closer by then.

  “So where did that guy come from, Marshal?” Dave asked, his voice a whisper. “How’d he get under those wheels? Do you know?”

  “Not exactly,” Duster said, being truthful. “But thanks to you four, I now have a lead. Now not a word.”

  All four nodded, picked up their coins, and headed back for the bar. He didn’t blame them for drinking after what they had just seen. It was bad enough a man had died like that. But just appearing out of thin air in that spot was something no sane man could grasp.

  At least not someone from 1898.

  After they had left, Bonnie came over and sat down beside him as he finished off his first glass of water and started on the second.

  “We going up to the mine?” she asked.

  “Looks like we have no choice,” Duster said. “Things are twisting bad around here.”