Rawhide Flat

by Ralph Compton

  Walsh took another drink from the bottle, then dragged on his cigarette. He spoke through a cloud of blue smoke.

  “I ain’t telling you where the money is hid. Them other people that was in the bank know I shot the teller lady. A black man who kills a white woman is going to swing in Nevada, no matter what. The only chance this nigger has of dodging the rope is to make a deal with the ranchers.”

  Crane made a show of thinking deeply, his hand kneading his chin. “Alas, what you say is true, Judah. The color of a man’s skin does count for something in this state.” The marshal brightened. “Tell you what, Judah. Show me where the money is hidden and I’ll put you on a good horse and give you an hour’s start before I come after you.”

  He took a step closer to Walsh and spread his arms wide. “I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

  “You go to hell,” the man said. “I ain’t showing you or nobody else less’n he’s nursing cows.”

  “And that’s your final word on the subject, Judah?”

  “I’m done talking. Now get out of here. Leave the bottle.”

  Smiling, Crane kicked out viciously. The toe of his boot slammed into the bottom of Walsh’s cheekbone. As the man’s head snapped back, the marshal followed up with his spur, the rowel tearing open the tight skin of Walsh’s cheek to the bone.

  Walsh screamed, crashed to the floor and his back came up hard against the wall.

  “Still done talking, Judah?” Crane asked. His voice was soft, almost kind, as though he were addressing an errant child.

  The black man moaned in reply. His hand held his mangled cheek and blood seeped through his fingers.

  The door to the office opened and Masterson stepped beside Crane. He glanced at Walsh without reaction and asked, “Did he talk?”

  The marshal shook his head. “Not yet. But he will, or I’ll cut him to ribbons.”

  His eyes hazed with shock and pain, Walsh spit blood and yelled, “Damn you, I’m telling you nothing and you can’t beat it out of me, not now, not ever.”

  Crane took his watch from his pants pocket and glanced at the time. “Judah, our train leaves in less than two hours,” he said. “By then I’ll know where the money is hidden.”

  “Just don’t kill him, Marshal,” Masterson said. “Dead, he’s no use to anybody.”

  Crane smiled. “I won’t kill you, will I, Judah? You’ll just wish you were dead.”

  He bent, picked up the whiskey bottle, stepped to the door, then turned. “See you soon, Judah.”

  The man looked at him fearfully, as though he were a torturer who had just entered the scarlet chamber with sadistic eyes and a glowing poker in his hand.

  Crane laid the bottle on the table and crossed to the gun rack. He took down a Winchester .44-40 and asked Masterson, “Is it loaded?”

  The sheriff nodded. “I keep it loaded. Recently at least.”

  Racking a round into the chamber, Crane opened the door and stepped outside. He looked at the feeding hogs for a moment, then brought the rifle to his shoulder and cut loose. His fire was rapid and accurate, and the hogs squealed and dropped one by one.

  A black pig with splotches of white on its back and chest tried to make a run for it. Crane fired and the speeding hog tumbled like a bouncing rubber ball and lay still.

  The marshal rested the rifle barrel on his shoulder and his cold eyes swept the street. A few men, attracted by the noise of the shooting, stood on the boardwalks, looking at him.

  “You men,” Crane called out, “pick up your dead, what’s left of them.”

  The townspeople glanced at one another uncertainly; then one of them broke and ran, disappearing into a store close to the station.

  Crane waited. He was aware of Masterson stepping beside him. The sheriff carried two Remingtons butt forward in holsters hung from a single wide belt with a U.S. Cavalry buckle. It was an unusual rig, but from all Crane had heard, Masterson could clear his guns and shoot with incredible speed.

  The sheriff was a man to have at your side or a man to fear at your back. Crane hoped he’d never have to find out which.

  “You think this is wise?” Masterson asked mildly.

  Crane nodded. “Uh-huh. I think you’ve already made your point. Besides, unless they’re frying in a pan, I don’t like hogs.”

  A few slow minutes ticked past. The sun was rising and the morning was growing hot. Fat black flies buzzed lazily around the bodies of the dead man and the hogs, making a small sound in the quiet. The air smelled of blood, dust and drifting powder smoke.

  A commotion at the end of the street attracted Crane’s attention. The man who’d run away was standing on the boardwalk gesticulating toward the door of the store, seemingly urging someone to hurry.

  Moments later a tall, skinny man in a black tailcoat stepped through the doorway, attempting to fasten a celluloid collar to his shirt as he walked. A second man appeared, dressed like the first, but this one was short and stocky, a black beard hanging to the waistband of his pants.

  “Simeon Pearl, the undertaker,” Masterson said. “The man with the beard is his assistant, Jacob Shirley.” The sheriff turned to Crane and smiled. “Shirley is a frustrated man. He isn’t married and the whores will have nothing to do with him. They say he stinks of corpses and makes them think of death and Judgment Day.”

  “Hard life being an undertaker, I would think,” Crane said. He was talking to Masterson, but his eyes were on the approaching men.

  “As bad as being a lawman?”

  The marshal shrugged. “Ain’t nothing as bad as that.”

  Simeon Pearl studded his collar in place and checked both bodies. He lingered for a long time over the man partially devoured by the hogs. The stench of death hung in the air like a black fog.

  Crane thought that the undertaker’s quickly jerking head, hunched shoulders and glittering black eyes gave him the look of Mr. Poe’s raven.

  Pearl raised his eyes to the marshal. “Oh dear, this will be most difficult,” he said. He turned to his assistant. “Do you not agree, Mr. Shirley?”

  The other man nodded. “Most difficult indeed, Mr. Pearl. A challenge for our skills, wouldn’t you say?”

  The wind flapped the tattered tails of Pearl’s coat and he looked as though at any minute he would take off, fly to the roof of the jail and croak, “Nevermore. . . .”

  “Once again your clarity of thought has ascertained the problem most directly, Mr. Shirley,” he said. His voice sounded like rusty nails being drawn out of a pine board. “Yes, a challenge. And very much so, I fear.”

  “You don’t need to make him pretty,” Crane said. “Just plant him, and the other one. Then tell the owner of the hogs to haul them away.”

  “And who, sir,” Pearl asked, “are you? I observe a badge of office on your breast, but from here I can’t determine what it says.”

  “It says I’m Deputy United States Marshal Augustus Crane. Now move that mess off the street.”

  “Let me say that the metropolis of Rawhide Flat is honored by your presence, Marshal,” Pearl said. His eyes angled to Masterson. “We sorely need some decent law and order around here.”

  Crane could almost see Pearl’s brain flit from one subject to another. The undertaker’s eyes grew crafty. “Marshal, let me get to the crux of the present . . . um . . . problem, no beating around the bush. As my colleague, Mr. Shirley, would say—clearly stating the case—who will square accounts for the interment of the deceased?”

  Masterson spoke. “Both those men were Rafter-T riders. Give your bill to Ben Hollister. He got them killed.”

  Pearl grimaced. “Mr. Hollister is a hard man, grown harder by the recent unpleasantness. He may not honor his obligations.” Pearl turned to Shirley. “Is that not the case, Mr. Shirley?”

  “Indeed it is, Mr. Pearl.”

  Suddenly Crane was sick of it . . . sick of the two chattering magpies hopping around the bodies . . . sick of this town . . . sick of Judah Walsh . . . sick of everything.


  He knew what was happening to him. It had happened many times before. The dark angel that followed him everywhere, in good times and bad, had again enveloped him in its wings, raking talons across his past until it bled, blighting his future.

  Crane reached into his pocket, found a ten-dollar gold eagle and threw it at Pearl’s feet. “Bury them, damn you.”

  The undertaker dived on the coin like a bird on a worm. Pearl straightened and said, “A rubber tarpaulin, I think, Mr. Shirley. And a good stout cart, preferably drawn by a beast of burden. And I think . . .”

  Crane turned away, not wanting to hear any more. He stepped into the office and Masterson followed him. The sheriff’s eyes were troubled.

  Crane sat at the table and looked at Masterson. “For what it’s worth, I believe you were justified in shooting the cowboys. It’s a lawman’s sworn duty to protect his prisoner.”

  The marshal’s delivery had been flat, emotionless. And Masterson, with his honed gunfighter instincts, picked up on it. “The Sideboard restaurant is open. You should get yourself some breakfast. Make you feel better.”

  “I’ll feel better when I get out of this damned town. I need a drink, that’s what I need.”

  “Then have one. Saloons are open as well.”

  “I’d get drunk and kill somebody. I don’t want that.”

  Masterson filled a cup from the coffeepot and laid it in front of Crane. “Spreading your rage thin, aren’t you?” he said. “All of a sudden.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Used to know a man like you down Cimarron way in the New Mexico Territory. Feller by the name of Clay Allison. Heard of him?”

  Crane nodded. Then he said, “I know of him, and he wasn’t like me.”

  As if he hadn’t been listening, the sheriff said, “Clay was all right most of the time, but every now and then something he called the ‘black thing’ would come over him. That’s when he’d spread his rage around and do most of his killing.”

  It was Crane’s inclination to tell the sheriff to shut his mouth and get the prisoner ready for the train. But when he looked into Masterson’s hard blue eyes, he thought he detected genuine concern, or at least interest.

  “I’m followed by a dark angel,” he said. “It sneaks up on me, brings back my past but shows me no future except shadows moving in a fog. When it takes hold of me, I want to curl up in a ball and melt into the earth and sleep forever without dreams.”

  “You feel like that now?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  The sheriff said, “I’ve killed ten men. They don’t keep me up o’ nights.”

  “Masterson, where’s your angel? I don’t see it.”

  “If it comes to a fight, is that what you’ll do, curl up on me?”

  “I’m a professional killer, Sheriff, just like you are. Killing is all I know. It’s what I’m good at. I won’t curl up on you.” Crane tried his coffee, then carefully set it on the table. “It won’t come to a fight. Get Walsh ready. The train leaves in thirty minutes and I’m taking him with me.”

  Masterson was suddenly alert and his eyes locked with Crane’s. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. Listen . . .”

  Chapter 5

  Crane heard it, the clank-clank of a steam engine pulling out of the station, its bell tolling a dirge for the death of his plans.

  The marshal jumped to his feet and ran out the office door. In the distance, the locomotive was chugging plumes of black smoke into the air.

  Crane swore loud and long as he ran around the back of the jail for his horse. He swung into the saddle and hit the street at a flat run.

  Somehow he had to stop the train.

  But Crane suddenly ran out of street. Ahead of him a line of about twenty riders blocked his path, strung out in a skirmish line from one boardwalk to the other. All of the men had rifles, butt plates resting on their thighs. They were punchers, well-mounted men in wide-brimmed hats who would know how to use the Winchesters they carried.

  Crane came to a sudden realization that he was losing this. The hard-bitten riders ahead of him wanted Judah Walsh and he couldn’t buck odds of twenty-to-one. He drew rein, defeat weighing on him like raw iron.

  He watched the riders walk their horses toward him. He could give up Walsh, let the ranchers recover their money. When he returned to Virginia City without his prisoner, no one would raise an eyebrow. Such things happened all the time along the Comstock, guilty men escaped, outlaws vanished into the mountains and not too many people cared. Everybody was too busy getting rich.

  The angel was at Crane’s shoulder, its whisper thin as a razor in his ear. “Let it go. . . . Just let it go. . . .”

  The riders stopped about ten yards from the marshal, close enough that he recognized the young puncher from the train. Two men detached themselves from the rest. They drew rein and sat their horses, studying him.

  One of the riders was a tall, blond man, huge in the shoulders and chest, an expression of arrogance, ruthlessness and cruelty on a handsome face that reminded Crane of one of the more depraved Roman emperors.

  The other man the marshal knew. Joe Garcia was a two-bit gunman out of Fort Worth, Texas. Garcia was half Irish, half Mexican and all son of a bitch, and he seemed to have been born with an inflated idea of his own importance. He was said to have killed a dozen men. How many had their wounds in the front, Crane didn’t know, but he guessed very few.

  The emperor was talking, his tall black horse up on its toes, prancing, eager to go. “My name is Ben Hollister. I own the Rafter-T, north of town.”

  Crane said nothing, and he saw a flash of irritation in Hollister’s eyes. This man walked a wide path and he was not accustomed to being ignored by those he considered underlings.

  Hollister opened his mouth to speak again, but Paul Masterson’s voice stopped him.

  “On your left, Marshal. Shotgun.”

  Crane nodded, most of his attention on Garcia. The little gunman was treacherous and sometimes pulled a derringer he kept hidden in his boot.

  “Since you’re here, you best listen to this, Masterson,” Hollister said. “It’s now”—he took a watch from his vest and glanced at the time—“eleven thirty. You have until this time tomorrow morning to hand over Judah Walsh.” His cold eyes moved to Crane. “And don’t count on the train. It won’t be coming back until this business is settled.”

  “And if we don’t give you Walsh?” Masterson said.

  “Then we’ll tear your jail down and take him.”

  “It’s been tried, Hollister.”

  “Next time will be different. I’ll be there.”

  “And me,” Garcia said, grinning.

  Crane was being pushed, and he didn’t like it. His depression was replaced by a slow rage in him, an emotion just as black and equally dangerous.

  “Hollister,” he said, “my pa always told me, ‘When you take the measure of a man, take his whole measure. ’ The fact that you’d hire a back-shooting tinhorn like Joe Garcia tells me a heap about you.”

  The little gunman sat his saddle, smiling like a hungry coyote on the trail of a wounded rabbit. “I can take you, Crane. Best you hobble your lip.”

  The marshal turned his horse so he was directly facing Garcia. His voice sounded like silk being drawn across steel. “Skin the Colt, Joe. Get your work in.”

  “No!” Hollister turned angrily to the gunman. “Back off, Joe. Kill a United States marshal in Rawhide Flat and the authorities will play hob.”

  “Kill a marshal now, kill him later.” Garcia shrugged. “It don’t matter none to me.”

  Crane said nothing. He’d told the man to reach for the iron and that was the extent of any conversation he wanted with Garcia. His talking was done.

  Hollister must have sensed that because he said, “You’ve both heard my demand. Now act on it.”

  The big rancher swung his horse away and yelled to his men, “Boys, we’ll make the Texas Belle our headquarters.” A ragged cheer went up as H
ollister led his men to the saloon.

  Crane watched him go, a man dressed in black broadcloth, his pants tucked into expensive, handmade boots. The rancher’s swagger and confident grin suggested raw power and the willingness to wield it. Because of the bank robbery he could be facing ruin, but he gave no indication of concern. Was that because he knew that Judah Walsh would soon be in his hands?

  Whatever the reason, Crane decided that Ben Hollister was no bargain and come tomorrow morning he could be a handful and then some.

  It was a thought to trouble a man.

  “More riders coming in,” Masterson said. He was looking out the window into the half-light of the dying day. The rain that had threatened earlier had not materialized and a few stars hung in a clear lemon and amber sky.

  Getting no response from Crane, the sheriff threw another mild sentence in his direction. “All the saloons are busy.”

  “Hollister won’t make a move until morning,” Crane said.

  “Think we can hold them, Marshal?”

  “Call me Augustus, for God’s sake.”

  “Gus?”

  “That fits.” Crane rose from his chair and stepped beside Masterson. “No, we can’t hold them. We’ll kill a few, but we will not hold them.”

  “Hollister won’t kill a federal marshal, but he’ll have no qualms about gunning a tin-star sheriff.”

  “When the shooting starts, those boys out there will be aiming at both of us. The death of a marshal is an inconvenience that can be explained away later.”

  “You have any ideas . . . Gus?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “That dark angel still troubling you?”

  “It’s sitting on my shoulder, but right now it’s leaving me alone.” Crane smiled. “Maybe it’s because I’m too scared to be depressed.”