Rawhide Flat

by Ralph Compton

  “Must be a deer,” he said.

  Crane rode up to the mouth of the arroyo and stepped out of the saddle. Masterson did likewise, his gaze still on the buzzards gliding effortlessly on the high air currents.

  Stepping carefully, the marshal walked deeper into the arroyo, Masterson beside him, a Remington in each hand. The sheriff’s handsome face had settled into hard planes, his eyes intent, unblinking.

  Both men had the gunfighter’s instinct for danger, but this was very different. They sensed evil, an awareness of an entity that clutched at the throat and made the air thick and hard to breathe and the sunlight that streamed around them less bright.

  Crane knew, as did Masterson, that an arroyo can’t be evil in itself. Therefore something or someone had brought the evil there. And still it lingered, cloying, like an unmoving mist the color of death.

  The coyotes had scented the two approaching men. The dog scrambled up the slope, followed by the smaller, nimbler female. Both animals vanished into the sage and piñon covering the lower mountain slope.

  A moment later Crane almost stumbled over the body of one of the nuns.

  The woman’s veil had been ripped off and her throat had been cut, so deeply she’d almost been decapitated. Despite her terrible death, the expression on her face was serene, as though in acceptance of the fate her God had ordained for her.

  Masterson called out from deeper in the canyon. “The other one is here. I guess she tried to make a run for it.”

  The second nun was younger and prettier, Hispanic, with black eyes and hair. Her throat had also been cut, but she had died hard, fighting for her life and there was blood and skin under her fingernails.

  She had given her killer a Mark of Cain that would take weeks to heal.

  Masterson stepped beside Crane, his face stiff. “Stark?”

  The marshal nodded. “Him, or he ordered it done.”

  “But why? I mean . . . nuns.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Crane felt a sense of loss. He had not rescued Sarah and if it hadn’t been for Masterson, a man he might have to kill, he would have thrown his life away needlessly. He was doing this all wrong. Suddenly he’d lost his way and didn’t know which way to turn.

  “What about the sisters?” Masterson asked, adding yet another problem.

  “Coyotes, vultures, we can’t leave them here. We’ll take them back to Rawhide Flat.”

  “It’s a ride,” the sheriff said, his face expressionless.

  A small anger flared in Crane. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  “Then, damn it, do as I tell you.”

  For a few moments Masterson stood in silence. He seemed to make up his mind about something. Then he said, “Sure, Gus, anything you say. I’ll bring the horses.”

  The day was shading into night as Crane and Masterson rode into Rawhide Flat.

  A steady rain fell, giving lie to the bright promise of the day, and clouds curled like lead, heavy and threatening.

  Along the street the saloons were already ablaze, spilling rectangles of light on the boardwalks that looked like wet paint.

  Hunched in the saddle, a rider in a yellow slicker passed the two lawmen. He looked, then looked again, startled at the burdens their horses carried.

  Crane led the way to the mission. He knocked on the door, then realized it was the empty schoolhouse. He stepped back to his horse and led it around the side.

  A door was lit, adorned on the inside by a rectangle of stained glass that hung from a brass chain. The picture was of the Virgin, her pale blue face contorted in grief, her crucified Son across her lap.

  The marshal rapped on the door and the stained glass bounced back and forth. Rain fell around him, hissing.

  The dark form of a nun appeared behind the door; then it swung open.

  “Why, Marshal Crane, what are you doing here?” Sister Marie Celeste asked.

  Standing tall, grim and terrible in the downpour, Crane said, “I have some bad news, Sister.”

  Masterson stepped beside him. He looked like a man who wanted to be anywhere else but where he was.

  “Two of your sisters are dead,” he said. “Murdered.” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”

  The sheriff and nun exchanged a look that Crane could not interpret.

  “Where are they?” Marie Celeste asked. Her voice was steady, as though she was trying to hold on to some kind of anchor. But her eyes were a dark tangle of conflicting emotions.

  “On the horses,” Masterson said. “We brought them back.”

  “Please, Sheriff, and you, Marshal, carry them inside.”

  The nun stood at the open door while the lawmen carried the dead sisters into the mission.

  “This way,” Marie Celeste said. She walked ahead of them, opened a door to her right and stood aside to let them pass. A young nun appeared in the hallway and cast a horrified look at the bodies, her hand flying to her mouth.

  “Go, bring the others,” the older woman said.

  For a moment the nun stood paralyzed, her eyes filling.

  “Now!” Marie Celeste snapped.

  The nun turned and fled, her sobs falling around her like raindrops.

  “This is the infirmary,” Marie Celeste told Crane. “As you can see, it’s not currently in use. Later we will take the sisters to the chapel.”

  The room was small. It held four cots and a glass-fronted medicine cabinet filled with brown and green bottles. A carved wooden statue of the Archangel Michael stood in one corner.

  After Crane and Masterson laid the bodies on cots, the nun saw their wounds for the first time. She gave a little cry of alarm and dropped a trembling hand to the rosary hanging from her belt. Black beads clicked through white fingers and the sister’s lips moved.

  “We discovered the bodies in an arroyo out near Sunrise Pass,” Crane said, quietly nudging the nun from prayer to present. “Why were they there, Sister?”

  “I sent them,” Marie Celeste answered. Her tormented face lifted heavenward. “God forgive me, I sent them.”

  “Why?” This from Masterson.

  Sudden zeal, like black fire, manifested itself in the nun’s eyes. “To turn aside Reuben Stark from his madness. He has convinced his followers that he will lead them to a Promised Land here in Nevada and that God will clear the way by unleashing the wrath of the Archangel Michael.”

  Marie Celeste closed her eyes and quoted from the Bible. “ ‘Behold, I am sending an angel to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared, saith the Lord.’

  “The Comstock and all its iniquity will be destroyed by Michael’s fiery sword and after the wicked are gone, Stark’s chosen people will enjoy a hundred years of peace and prosperity.

  “That is what he has told them. I wanted to open his people’s ears to the truth, that the Lord has never made such a promise to Reuben Stark. The man seeks only his own gain. That is why he has murdered my nuns and given the blessing of martyrdom.”

  A dozen sisters had filed into the infirmary and had surrounded the bodies. Now they tearfully looked to Marie Celeste for guidance.

  “You must go now, gentlemen,” she said. “Thank you for what you have done.”

  “One thing, Sister,” Crane said, “do you know where Stark’s Promised Land is? He has . . . something valuable of mine and I want it back.”

  Marie Celeste shook her head. “No, I don’t know, Marshal. But a thousand people with their wagons and livestock can’t vanish into thin air. I’m sure you will find it and that . . . item you value so much.”

  Chapter 21

  Rain ticked on the roof of the sheriff’s office and distant thunder rumbled.

  Masterson stood at the stove, pouring coffee into two cups. He set the cups on the table, then got the whiskey bottle from the writing desk. He poured a hefty shot into each.

  “I think we need this after today,” he said.

  Crane nodded in agreeme
nt. He got to his feet and looked out the window.

  “Town’s quiet.”

  “Uh-huh. That tends to happen when Ben Hollister isn’t around.”

  “I thought he wanted to keep an eye on you?”

  “Oh, he still does. I’m sure he’s got a few of his boys posted out there somewhere.”

  Crane took his seat again. He looked at Masterson. “Give the town the money, Paul. I don’t want a gun showdown between you and me.”

  The sheriff smiled. “Did I ever tell you I have a sister?”

  “No, I don’t think you have. But is it really necessary?”

  “I think it is. My sister, she has a daughter. Angie is her name. Well, anyway, when Angie was a little girl her mother would scold her about something or other she’d done wrong, and know what the kid would tell her?”

  Crane shook his head.

  “She’d say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ ”

  “And you don’t want to talk about the money?”

  “Not tonight, Gus.”

  “All right, I’ll take a pass on it for now. What do you want to talk about?”

  Masterson sipped his coffee and indicated that Crane should do the same.

  “Good, huh?”

  “Real good,” Crane said. “Puts fire in a man’s belly.”

  “Why did Stark decide to move those pilgrims out of the pass?” the sheriff asked.

  “I’d guess he has a couple of reasons. For one thing, he can’t get his hands on the town’s fifty thousand,” he said, then added pointedly, “since you’re the only one who knows where it’s at.”

  Masterson smiled and let that go as Crane continued. “And for another, if he waited much longer, he’d have to feed and house a thousand people and their animals all winter. That takes money Stark doesn’t have, so why not lead them to the Promised Land now? Wherever it is.”

  “It’s getting too late in the year for them pumpkin-rollers to put in a crop.”

  “Maybe Stark is counting on that,” Crane said. “Once he has what he wants, he’ll let the people starve. Cattle country won’t grow crops and he knows that. They’ll either have to die or move on. The question is, what does he want?”

  “I told you before. Range, cattle. Maxie told me his ambition is to found a dynasty.”

  “But whose range?”

  Masterson smiled. “Everybody’s. He wants it all.”

  A silence stretched between the men, broken only by the rattle of rain against the windows and the sigh of the surging wind.

  “How many fighting men you reckon Stark could muster?” Masterson asked finally.

  “He’s got maybe a thousand people with him. Take away women, children and old men and he still could field two-fifty, three hundred riflemen.”

  “Even banded together the ranchers couldn’t come up with half that number.”

  “Stark won’t need to send out his fighting men. A thousand people with wagons can cover the range like locusts and take over every ranch. Even Hollister won’t let his riders shoot down hundreds of women and children. He knows he’d have the Army down on him and where its sympathies would lie. A lot of them bluecoats are farm boys themselves.”

  “Kill Stark and we stop it, huh?”

  “That’s how it shapes up. He’s their leader and if he goes, the rest will move on.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do. Kill Stark.”

  “We have to get to him first. If he’s surrounded by three hundred armed men that might not be so easy.”

  Wearing slickers as they rode through a downpour, Crane and Masterson left Rawhide Flat just before sunup.

  The rain had persisted throughout the night and into the morning and the sky was black from horizon to horizon. A keening wind blew from the north and rippled the long grass and the mountains were lost behind low-lying clouds.

  The lawmen rode due south for an hour before they cut the trail of the wagon train, a deep scar across the high plains that angled farther to the west toward Hot Springs Mountain.

  That was also the direction of Ben Hollister’s Rafter-T.

  “Unless Stark plans on invading Carson City,” Masterson said, “the Rafter-T is where he’s headed.”

  A few minutes later they found the place where the train had bedded down for the night. It looked like Stark had circled the wagons as a precaution. The old man was obviously prepared for war and trusted no one.

  Under a thrashing rain and pummeled by wind, the lawmen followed the wagon tracks.

  An hour later they discovered the dead men at a cabin just off the trail.

  An attempt had been made to fire the place, but the rain had stopped the spread of the flames. Tendrils of smoke rose from a hole in the sod roof, only to be instantly shredded by the wind.

  One man lay on his back just outside the cabin door. He looked to be in his fifties, heavily bearded, wearing the rough garb of a silver prospector. He’d been shot several times and his throat had been slashed.

  Another man, younger, no more than twenty, was sprawled on the cabin floor. He too had been shot and his throat was cut. A black dog lay near the man. It was also dead. The dirt floor was black with blood.

  Crane looked around the cabin. The shelves had been stripped of supplies and two hooks screwed into the wall showed where a rifle had once hung.

  “There’s a lean-to stable back there, looks like it held a couple of burros,” Masterson said.

  “Place has been stripped clean,” Crane said. “Not even a bean left.”

  “Stark?”

  “Who else? And no more than a couple of hours ago. Maybe a few wagons with women and young ’uns showed up before first light asking for help. The prospectors weren’t expecting trouble until the men arrived and started shooting.”

  “Their throats have been cut. I’d say this was done by the same man who killed the nuns.”

  “Looks like.”

  The marshal stepped to the door of the cabin and glanced out at the slanting rain.

  “I’m hungry and I need coffee,” he said. “We’ll eat here where it’s sheltered before we take the trail again.”

  “With that in here?” Masterson asked, nodding toward the dead man and the dog.

  “Drag them outside if they bother you. And on your way back bring those beef sandwiches we bought this morning and the coffee.”

  “Anybody ever tell you that you’re a man who loves to give orders?”

  “All the time,” Crane said. “It goes with the badge.”

  The fire in the cabin’s rusty stove still glowed red. Crane added wood and when Masterson brought the pot he filled it from a stream running nearby.

  Later they ate thick sandwiches of stale sourdough bread and black, tough beef that they were glad to wash down with coffee.

  “How much did you pay for these?” Crane asked, chewing.

  “Fifty cents for the two.”

  “You were robbed.”

  “Ma’s Kitchen was the only place open.”

  “Ma must have been a trail cook at one time.”

  “You do some punchin’, Gus?”

  “Some. I first went up the trail when I was fourteen. You?”

  “Never did. When I was a younker I got a situation in the bookbinding business. I lasted three years, then quit. A while after that I hooked up with a man by the name of Blue Face Pollock and went into the banking trade.”

  “Were you a teller?”

  Masterson shook his head. “Nah, a robber.”

  “Paid better than bookbinding, huh?”

  “Yeah, it did, but it wasn’t what you’d call a regular wage. Spend like a drunken sailor one week, broke the next.”

  Masterson was looking through the door, his eyes fixed on something in the distance.

  “What happened to Pollock? He still around?”

  “He got hung up Fort Benton way a few years back. Shot the captain of a steamboat and the vigilantes strung him up the next day. I guess they set store by that captain.”


  Masterson nodded toward the door. “Rider coming. A tall man on a tall horse.”

  Chapter 22

  Crane stepped to the door and looked into the rain. After a few moments he said, “Hard to tell, but that may be the man I saw at the arroyo.”

  “The way he rides, straight up and down like that, he’s got a look to him,” Masterson said. “A former cavalryman, maybe.”

  The rider drew rein when he was a few yards from the cabin. “Howdy, gents,” he said, touching his hat brim.

  Crane nodded and took stock of their visitor.

  He wore a slicker, but the thinness of his body and narrow, stooped shoulders were evident. His face was cadaver thin, but burned by the sun to a mahogany color, and his pale eyes moved constantly, missing nothing. A flat-brimmed, low-crowned hat sat just above bushy eyebrows and the man’s lipless mouth under his mustache was a mean, narrow gash. His right cheek was scarred with three parallel wounds that were red and raw.

  Crane leaned against the doorjamb. Masterson had been right. The rider had a look to him—the look of a professional gunman and a killer of nuns.

  “Seen your smoke an’ smelled your coffee,” the man said. His smile was the cold grimace of a skull. “But then, I’ve been looking for you boys anyhoo.”

  “What’s your business with us?” Crane asked.

  “I have a proposition for you, from the Reverend Stark.” Rain drummed on the rider’s hat and ran in skeletal fingers down the shoulders of his oilskin slicker.

  “So it’s reverend now, is it?” Masterson said.

  The tall man shrugged. “If that’s what he wants to be called, then that’s what I call him.”

  “I don’t want to hear Stark’s proposition,” Crane said. “But give him mine. Tell him if him and his sons surrender to me, I’ll make sure they have red, white and blue bunting on their gallows and a well-attended hanging.”

  “Maybe you should hear what he has to say first.”

  The tall man looked up at the black, lowering sky. “You lawdogs gonna keep me out in the rain? It don’t seem real polite. But I guess that’s what folks are like nowadays, just no consideration for nobody.”