Hot Lead, Cold Justice

by Mickey Spillane

  “Even today,” she said, shrugging, kneeling next to him, “this is hard country. People have to help each other out.”

  “Not all do. From where do your people hail?”

  She pointed to the floor. “I hail from right here. I was born in this house. My father lived many places. Ohio, mostly. So. Have I earned the right to ask the circumstances of your wound?”

  His expression darkened, his eyes gazing past her. “I came upon . . . I came upon some rabble who were in the act of stealing a buckboard wagon . . . from a father and son. They . . . your tender ears may not wish to hear. . . .”

  “I grew up on this ranch. I’ve seen kindness and cruelty and everything between. Don’t spare my feelings in telling your story.”

  She, of course, could not know that the real story from which Lucas Burnham wove his lies was crueler still.

  “I attempted,” he said, “to stop it, but I was . . . I was one man, and they were four of the lowest kind. The man and his son were killed.”

  She recoiled. “How terrible.”

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what some men were capable of. “Most terrible. I shot and, I believe, killed two of the four, but was wounded myself . . . as you know . . . and I rode away into the thick of the storm . . . where they dare not follow.”

  Something about her patient’s stilted language warned her, finally, that she had made a mistake. What she had taken as a certain gentlemanly formality now seemed perhaps contrived. She wasn’t certain of it, but an alarm bell was ringing, however faintly.

  She rose and gathered the enameled tin of water she’d brought from the kitchen, bloody towels wadded within, then offered him one more swig of the Old Crow. He took the offer, smiled, and said, “Thank you, ma’am,” then handed it back.

  “Let’s get you back into your shirt.”

  She crouched to help him. Again, his grimaces were not accompanied by moans or groans. He was a brave soldier.

  “You just rest there now,” she said, rising.

  “What is your name, child?”

  With the bowl in her arms, she said with a smile, “You must make up your mind, sir. Am I ‘ma’am’ or ‘child’?”

  “As a gracious hostess, you’re a ‘ma’am.’ With your youth and beauty, a child.”

  “And you are?”

  Something proud came into his expression. “I am Luke Burnham. Have you heard that name before?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  “Possibly. I made something out of it during the war . . . but that was likely before you were born. I’ve told you my name. What is yours?”

  “Willa Cullen. This is the Bar-O where you find yourself stranded. One of the largest spreads around these parts, although after this blizzard finishes with us, there may not be much of anything of value left in this Territory, big or small.”

  “I never saw the like,” he said, shaking his head, then glancing toward the iced-over windows, the howl of wind proving his point. “Something else I never saw the like of.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your kindness. Ma’am. Child.” He smiled and it was almost charming.

  Willa returned the smile, somewhat, wondering whether she should be scared or comforted.

  She took everything back into the kitchen, dumping the water in the sink, leaving the bloody towels on the counter, then putting the whiskey bottle away in a cupboard.

  When she came back, her guest was asleep. She took the Indian blanket from the other chair by the fire and covered him up with it. He was breathing deep. With that wound, a bed might have done him better, but she did not want to disturb him.

  Willa returned to the hearth, near the warmth of the dancing flames, but kept her eyes on her guest. In these last few minutes that alarm bell had begun to ring louder. That milky eye that had made her think of her father was no longer warming, like this fire. Rather, it made her study the scar that ran through his eye, the physical reminder, and remainder, of violence in this man’s past, like the scars on his flesh.

  The sound of a horse whinnying in discomfort was not loud enough to wake her guest, but made Willa realize that she had been so quick to help the distressed traveler she found on her doorstep, to bring him inside, to warm him and bind his wounds, that she hadn’t given one thought to how he got here. The frosted-over windows were no use, so she went to the door and looked out. A black horse, a very handsome steed, was tied out front.

  The poor creature would freeze if she didn’t act quickly.

  She got into her brown woolen box coat with its three ulster-like capes, snugged on leather gloves, tugged on a fur-trimmed matching bonnet, and went out to brave the storm. The horse, tied at the rail just past the porch, was dancing against the cold, trying to shake the ice and snow off its mane and tail; she approached and calmed it with a hand on its muzzle and her voice in its ear, with the intention of unhitching the animal and walking it by the bridle over to the horse barn.

  Something about the animal seemed familiar. Didn’t Clarence Mathers, the hardware store owner, have a Morgan horse like this? She checked the brand, which was indeed CMH, the H for hardware.

  That was when she noticed the large canvas bag slung over the horse, between the front of the saddle and the rise of the steed’s long neck. She took a closer look at the bag, but didn’t have to open it to guess its contents.

  The feel of the smaller coin and cash bags within the larger one made that clear enough, and the stenciled words FIRST BANK OF TRINIDAD confirmed her assumption.

  The man with the bullet wound and the milky eye was a bank robber and a horse thief. Not some Good Samaritan who had tried unsuccessfully to rescue a father and son . . .

  On the rump of the animal, in back of the saddle, was a rifle scabbard. In it was a Winchester Lever Action 1873, a weapon well-known to a girl who grew up on a ranch. She withdrew it from its home and checked to see if it was loaded.

  It was.

  She swallowed. Girded herself and turned with the rifle in hand, toward the nearby steps to the porch. She took her first step in that direction when the front door opened, freezing her, her guest silhouetted against the light of the indoors. His features were lost in shadow, but when he brought up his hand, the steel of the revolver in it flashed before he fired.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Wolves or coyotes had got to them.

  The bodies of the father and son, whose buckboard Caleb York had discovered behind the saddle-shop building, had been dug up and dined upon, two human beings turned into slaughterhouse leavings on the roadside. The grisly sight was softened only slightly by subsequent snowfall giving them a dignified dusting.

  York barely paused to take in the grotesque evidence of deaths caused by far worse predators than those who had feasted here. Recovery of what remained of the man and boy would wait for the storm to end and the sun to reveal other terrible secrets.

  The sheriff could not spare time in the already painfully slow pursuit of Lucas Burnham, who almost certainly was making his way to the Bar-O and Willa Cullen. Astride his faithful dappled gray gelding, York was busy riding through and around the shifting, drifting snow on that road north, defined only by telegraph poles, themselves heavy with white, lines sagging with ice.

  Black frock coat flapping, hat tied down with a muffler, another woolen scarf wrapped around his face, leaving little but his eyes exposed, York leaned into the hungry wind and eddying snow, a dark wraith flying through an afternoon that seemed as impenetrable as any night. Yet he took care not to push the gelding too hard. If the animal died underneath him, should an ankle snap in deep snow, should its great heart burst, the rider would be marooned on this bleached beach with his goal unreachable.

  He could not know Burnham’s intentions. Possibly the man—that word didn’t seem to cover it, perhaps “fiend” was more like it—sought to strike back at York by defiling or doing Willa in, or both. Or perhaps the fiend’s own human needs—the wound that needed doctoring, the shelter require
d in this hellish storm—had sent him to the Bar-O as the nearest safe haven.

  And why not? What better than to wait in a warm ranch house for the object of your revenge to deliver himself?

  Caleb York was not an overly emotional man. He felt things deep but tended to hold them in, hardly unusual among his contemporaries, particularly those who had chosen the unforgiving West for their home. But within him roiled rage and dread, as he contemplated the inevitability of Lucas Burnham reaching the Cullen ranch before him.

  Forty minutes had dragged themselves by before the Bar-O’s rough-wood log arch materialized off to the right, the plaque swaying in the wind, swinging hard enough to shake off any snow that might otherwise have clung. Still, the flurries themselves seemed to have lessened some, as York on the gelding swung into the turn where the dirt lane lay buried somewhere beneath the animal’s hoofbeats, as they churned up powdery bursts.

  As before, the buildings of the Bar-O appeared like an illusory image and not the reality, a crystalline suggestion aswirl in ivory flecks of the ranch house and its outbuildings. As he drew nearer, coming in past a corral gathering only frozen precipitation, York could make out a slight figure in shades of brown standing beside a fine black horse that he knew belonged to Trinidad’s hardware man.

  Willa!

  What was she doing? She was alongside the horse, doing something . . . taking a rifle from the scabbard alongside the saddle, and then turning toward the house, where the front door opened and a figure—could that be Burnham?—fired at her, making small, awful thunder in this frigid gale.

  She went down!

  But she was moving from her prone position on her belly, firing back twice, creating two more small thunder cracks in the vocal weather, and the door slammed.

  Near the ranch house, York slid off the still moving gelding and, .44 in his gloved hand now, slow-ran through the deep snow to the woman on the ground, her back to him, propped up barely on her elbows. He knelt by her and she looked up at him, the pretty face framed by the fur-trimmed brown bonnet, pink flesh sprinkled with snow. Her eyes widened and her smiling expression was a girlish thing, surprised and delighted.

  “Are you hit?” he asked, breathless.

  “No! No, I’m fine. Is the horse all right?”

  That was so like her.

  “It’s fine.” He helped her to her feet, but said, “Stay low. He could be at a window.”

  They hunkered.

  She asked, “Who is he?”

  “Lucas Burnham.”

  “That’s the name he gave. Meant nothing to me. He seemed almost proud of it.”

  “Oh, he is proud.” York didn’t tell her she’d likely be dead now had she recognized it. “‘Burn ’Em’ Burnham rode with Quantrill. He’s a butcher.” He had her elbow now. “Let’s walk our animals to the stable.”

  Her cornflower-blue eyes were wild as an alley cat’s. “We should go in after him! I don’t want him burning me out!”

  “I don’t think that’s what he has in mind. What you’re going to do is go into that horse barn with your rifle. If he circles around, comes in and tries for a horse, shoot him in the head.”

  “My pleasure.”

  They walked the animals, the hardware store horse on the outside, York and Willa between it and the gelding.

  York said, “He’s likely in there waiting for me to come get him. I put him in prison for ten years.”

  “Good for you!”

  As they walked, she told him, teeth chattering, of how Burnham had come to her door with his tale of trying to help a father and son in their buckboard, who’d been attacked by brigands.

  “Burnham and his boys,” York said, “were the brigands. They slaughtered those good folk like the many he killed in his raiding days.”

  Soon they were inside the stable, with its stove-driven warmth and mostly empty stalls, two of which they filled with the gelding and the black Morgan horse.

  At the double doors of the barn, as he prepared to leave, Willa said, “What are you going to do, Caleb?”

  “I’m going in your house and kill the bastard. If you hear gunshots, one of us will be dead. If it’s me, killing him will be up to you.”

  Many women would have protested this plan, but Willa only nodded, her eyes tight and free of tears. The only expression of her femininity was, after studying him a bit, to kiss him on the mouth before he went out there, a kiss as wet as the outside, but hot, not cold.

  Then she said, “You can’t die, Caleb York.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “No. Then who would be left to make an honest woman out of me?”

  He grinned at her and she grinned back, and then he gave her a kiss almost as good as the one she gave him.

  * * *

  Lucas Burnham stormed through the house, trying to decide where to hide himself to ambush that bastard York. Through a living room window he’d seen that the sheriff of Trinidad had ridden up. Come to the fair damsel’s rescue like the damn dime-novel hero fools said he was!

  Only the fair damsel had damn near killed Burnham with that rifle, her bullets whistling past him before he shut the door on her. Now he moved quickly through the rooms like a child desperately seeking a hiding place while a playmate covered his eyes and counted to ten (“One Mississippi . . . two Mississippi . . .”).

  But no place presented itself. The rooms were large, furnished well but sparsely, with wardrobes not closets, and he knew not to hide under a bed, as he remembered shooting right through the mattresses at beds in homes he was raiding and killing those concealing themselves beneath.

  Panic set in.

  Caleb York was out there, minutes, perhaps seconds away from coming in after him, from confronting the man who had boasted of the vengeance he would take. The man who had mistakenly shot down York’s deputy.

  Wasn’t fair!

  Burnham was wounded, and weak from having to ride in such an unsteady condition. As much as he wanted to take York down, surviving was the important thing now. To live to fight another day . . . unless the opportunity for ambush presented itself. That would serve as well as face to face, because Burnham was a soldier and soldiers did battle—they didn’t duel in some mistakenly gentlemanly manner.

  So after his brisk, mildly hysterical tour of the Cullen ranch house, Lucas “Burn ’Em” Burnham got into his Rebel jacket—the one he’d taken off a dead Confederate officer years ago—and slung on his gun belt and pulled on his duster and looked for a way the hell out of there.

  * * *

  York went in the unlocked front door, fast and low. He had an immediate view of the long, narrow living room. The only furnishings behind which Burnham might have been hiding were the two big, rough-hewn chairs angled toward the fire, which was really going, flames leaping as if eager to tell York which way the son of a bitch had gone. Staying as near the floor as he could, York approached those chairs, but no one was in or behind them.

  The dining room was empty.

  And the kitchen.

  A study and two bedrooms—no one hiding or plastered to a wall or otherwise lying in wait.

  But at the end of the hall that joined all of these rooms, the door to the outside was ajar. York paused before pushing through, listening, but the howl of wind covered any sound his prey might have been making.

  So he threw himself out, twisting, to land on his butt in a drift, swinging to face the house. Burnham’s best bet would have been to wait with his back against the outside wall and pick York off as he came through.

  But Burnham hadn’t done that.

  Instead, the outlaw was doing something that York considered foolish, even stupid. The sheriff could see his man, running as best he could in the high snow, heading north into the wind, out to where the Cullen spread’s pastures yawned invisibly in the eddying snowfall.

  York pursued.

  Had this been any other outlaw on earth, he might not have met stupidity with stupidity. Might have waited for another day to finish this, as Bur
nham would surely not let it end here if he could help it. All York had to do was stay put and wait. Wait and watch, looking constantly over his shoulder.

  Hell with that.

  Yet beneath his woolen scarf, Caleb York was grinning.

  Lucas Burnham was scared.

  In a spot, the outlaw had reverted to the coward he’d always been, on horseback assaulting unsuspecting civilians, burning down homes and schools and churches and hospitals alongside the guerilla rabble he’d run with, and the captain he so admired who was reviled by North and South alike.

  And now the coward was doing another kind of running.

  So York pursued.

  The stalker with badge and gun could never quite close the distance, though. Fear provided his wounded quarry with fuel. Justice could only keep a lawman going—aided in this case by the depth of wickedness this infamous fugitive bore.

  And when Burnham, trudging onward into the wind and sleet and snow, finally began to slow, so did York, who for all his will, remained human. Around them, now that they had drifted through drifts into grazing land blanketed alabaster, horrible sights presented themselves.

  Horns of buried cattle stuck out sporadically like the leafless branches of a grotesque dead garden. Here and there little groups of cattle stood in nightmare fashion, this one frozen solid, that one alive but soon to join the others. From another drift rose the seemingly severed head of a dead pony, but as York passed, he could tell that the rest of the animal was there, too, just buried.

  How long this went on, York had no idea. He knew only that he would not stop until he had tracked this son of a bitch down. He was well past arresting him. He would rid the world of this malady with a bullet in the head, content in knowing that Lucas Burnham had suffered today out in this frozen desert.

  The sky darkening did not become obvious at once because the storm itself was a night of sorts. But the real night had come, all right, and that was when, finally, York lost sight of his prey.

  What had become of Burnham, York had no idea. The occasional stray cow—some dead, in various states of blanched burial, others on all fours and waiting for their last roundup—offered the only cover Burnham could have used in a desperate ambush attempt.