Now he stood back in the shadows well down the street, watching the commotion he’d caused, and wondering not a little who it was these fools thought had done the deed. He lit another cigarette and puffed with vigor. Tobacco had been something he’d missed in prison. It was rare he’d gotten a dose of it in that rathole.
Every sliver of every moment he’d spent in that hellish pit, Tin Falls Prison, welled up in him even as the first luscious drops of the old crow’s blood pooled beneath the blade.
He’d relished that delicious moment when the old whore was still alive, still aware of who she was, where she was, and what was happening to her in that precious brief slice of time when her mind was still with her and the room still made sense to her.
Skin fancied he’d experienced it as she had, with her smells, her old, frail, failed body beneath the layers of quilting and nightgown, and the ticking of her old mantel clock. The dim light of that dying afternoon cut in through the dusty, close air, through glass and the yellowed lacework curtains.
And when she realized what was happening to her, she tried to scream, but found it was too late for that, for her screams brought nothing but pink bubbles from the deep red welling gash—pop, pop, pop. That was the bit Skin Varney decided he had enjoyed most of all. The old woman’s blinking eyes had given him the satisfaction he had long desired.
And yet he did not think the old bird knew who he was. And why should she? She had been but one of so many people in Promise who had wronged him, robbed him—that was rich, coming from the man who had robbed them, after all, and he chuckled at the thought. But then he grew grim once more. No, damn it, they would all pay, if they knew who he was or not.
He would let them know because he was their nightmare. He had been a man in his prime years, and they had locked him away, to rot and toil and sweat and eat bad food and fight rats for that very food and sometimes eat the rats, too, when the warden shoved you down in the Hole. The pit within the pit—that was what they called it.
No, these bastards deserved to know who he was and why he was there. He had nothing to lose. The entire time he was in that hellhole, he’d had one goal beyond wreaking his revenge on the town that had robbed him. This is where he would begin his hunt for Samuel Thorne, the real culprit in all this.
If they didn’t know where he was, then he would take the town apart piece by piece, person by person. Promise was where he knew the double-crossing backstabber had spent all his time—with that witch who’d whelped his offspring, Rose something or other. A whore at Millie’s Place. Lowest of the low.
And he knew all about whores. His own mother had been such, at a hog farm on the trail west, and he’d grown up scurrying like a rat from her diseased room whenever a team of drovers rumbled through.
He knew what whores did and what they were good for, and that was why he’d told Thorne back when they’d partnered up to stay clear of Rose. He’d wasted his breath. Might as well have talked to a stick.
Skin Varney shoved away from the east wall of the stage depot and scratched at his thick thatch of peppery beard, then gnawed a fingernail. He’d do well to play this game a little longer, tease it out and see how much of a knot these fools got themselves worked into.
“I got time.” Varney chuckled low and walked back behind the empty depot to where his bone rack of a horse stood, hipshot and dozing. “Skin Varney’s got plenty of time now.”
He smacked a hand on the saddle. “Wake up, horse. Let’s us go make camp in the hills, then pay a visit to some old mine rats up thataway. Then we’ll give thought to choosing our next visit to the pretty little town of Promise.”
Within moments, the only sign of Skin Varney in town that night was the lingering smell of smoke and the last echoes of his low husky chuckling.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was the deepest ink black night Fletcher had ever known. And yet, once he began to look around, really look into the darkness, he saw that it was not all black. The sky overhead was shot through with sprays of light, far off and high up. Starshine—and there was so much of it, he saw, now that he had slowed to a limping walk forward—was a sight he’d never beheld in such abundance before. Even if he had wanted to see such beauty, he had been nested in the sooty, cramped environs of Providence, his home, his town, his chosen place.
But had it really been his own chosen place? Or had he been forced into life there as a child to be kept tight and safe within it, schooled and sheltered?
He heard a far-off yipping. Coyotes, he was certain of it. He’d heard them several times on the journey west, and had been told of them by one of the stage drivers. This one sounded too far away to do him any damage, or so he hoped. Yet he was now troubled with this notion that nothing, absolutely nothing in his life was as he had thought mere weeks before.
Before him, a soft sliding sound jerked him to a halt. It continued away from him. What could that have been? A rat? A snake? His toes curled in his boots at the thought.
He resumed walking, yet at a slower pace. His entire life so far had been a lie. And then he stopped trudging once again as a fresh and mighty notion came to him. Where had he come by the name Ralston? Neither from his father, this Samuel Thorne, nor from his mother, Rose McGuire.
Why should he have a name different from theirs? Unless this entire mess was some odd hoax. But why? To what end? To bilk him out of money he did not have? He coughed and sniffed as dust from his awkward steps tickled his nose. He was desperate for a drink, for food, for a bath, for clean clothing.
“If I thought closing my eyes would whisk me back to my home in Providence, I would already be there.”
But that was not to be. And he knew it. It did not change the fact that he was in a predicament not of his making. In mere hours, he had become a stranger to himself. He was also not wealthy, as he had expected to be. Not only was he not the beneficiary of a substantial inheritance; he was penniless, save for a run-down bordello. He smiled in the dark, thinking of what the faces of his few friends back East would look like as he explained that he was now a whoremaster.
He was also an orphan once again. Or perhaps not, as he had no way of knowing if his father was alive. And was this Samuel Thorne actually his father? To top it all off, he was now a man suspected of murder, a man who he guessed would now have a bounty price put on his head. All for something he had not done.
Fletcher sighed in disgust. He really was clueless as to the ways of the people out here on this savage, law-free frontier. What would they do to him once they caught him? He had little doubt that they would run him aground eventually. He’d run not so much to escape them as out of panic. He needed to give himself time to think.
“Think, Fletcher,” he said to the night about him. “There must be a way to extricate yourself from this foolishness. What would Mr. Heep do?”
His supervisor was, after all, one of the more clever people he’d ever met. “Mr. Heep,” said Fletcher as he walked. He licked his swollen, cracked lips. “I know you are a busy man, but perhaps you could spare me a moment of your precious time. You see, I am in a bit of a fix—a bit of a pickle, as you might say.”
In the dark of the Wyoming night, Fletcher waited for an answer, but the brilliant Mr. Heep did not respond. He searched his own cluttered, distracted mind, seeking reason and logic, even as he looked back toward the place he’d left, the angry little town where a woman lay dead, a woman who, it seemed, knew more about him than he himself knew.
After a fashion, he found he had been walking gradually, then steeply uphill. He had also begun with increasing frequency to walk into trees and low rocks. The trees grew thicker, and he recalled on the stagecoach ride into town that the slopes of the hills down which they’d rumbled had been treed, thick with them at times, what type he didn’t know, but they hurt like the devil when he walked into them. He also recalled the town had been nested in a valley surrounded with foothills that led to m
ountains. He could be walking in any direction by now.
He wondered if he was leaving a trail. He’d read somewhere in his youth, at Swinton’s School for Boys, about those larger-than-life frontier figures who could all read “sign,” as they called it. One had made the boast that he could track a mouse across bare rock. If that were even half true, then Fletcher had surely left his own sign, a trail of dragging footprints, across the sparsely grassed, earthy countryside that led up into these hills.
No, “hills” was not the correct word. He recalled the size of the peaks toward which he’d roved. They were mountains. None of this helped him as he trudged on toward he knew not what. He might figure out what to do next if he found a quiet place to hole up, to hide away and think. Perhaps by a stream.
Oh, he would give his entire laughable inheritance for a drink in a clear, cold mountain stream. He giggled out loud. “Inheritance, indeed.” He sighed. A brothel?
That his thoughts turned once again to the grisly, gruesome sight of poor old Millie, slain in her bed. Who had done such a brutal thing? And why?
Fletcher was also aware he had grown cold as the night thickened about him and the length of his strides had shortened. He’d shifted the satchel so many times from one hand to the other, he was no longer aware when he did so. He was aware only of the sore ache in his curled hands, the blisters on his palms, the throbbing in his face, the thudding pain in his left ankle. He hadn’t dared to pay more attention to his face and neck than to pick out the largest of the slivers bristling from him like pins in a cushion.
You must keep moving, he told himself. One step more and, after that, one step more. And so on and on until you reach . . . where, Fletcher? Where is it you hope to reach? Isn’t one place as good as another when you are lost and alone in the mountains of Wyoming Territory?
He put one dragging foot before the next, stumbling upslope, ever steeper in the darkness, cursing as he collided with unseen dangers. Eventually he groped a coarse-barked tree, bigger around than he could reach with his aching arms.
“Enough,” he whispered, his breath clouding the darkness before him. He leaned, hugging the tree. “Enough for now, for tonight.”
And Fletcher J. Ralston slumped, collapsing into a pile beneath the tree, half leaning against it as sleep overpowered him like a grizzly on a mule deer fawn.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
What woke Fletcher wasn’t apparent right away. He turned his head and dozens of hot needles poked his face and neck. He winced and groaned; his body fought the act of unfolding from the hunched, seated position he’d assumed the night before.
Exhaustion had draped over him, pressing down like a wet wool blanket, and he’d not moved in all the hours since. Muscles he hadn’t used since romping on playing fields of his schoolboy youth had been exerted, stretched, pulled, twisted, and then dropped once more into disuse.
Through the fog of sleep and pain, Fletcher registered that the soundless thing that woke him and turned his head was the gaping black snout of a gun, the end of the barrel hovering two inches from his left temple. The barrel looked long and hollow and seemed to echo with the screams of everything it had ever laid low.
It was thick and made of gray-black steel and looked heavy, and though Fletcher had no idea if it was a shotgun or rifle, he did suspect it was the last thing he’d ever see with clarity.
Then something fuzzy-looking shifted some feet beyond it. The blurred thing was brownish and gray and wispy. Fletcher had trouble bringing whatever it was into focus. When he did, he saw a face, a man’s face, an angry man’s face. Silver bearded and bushy. And above the big mustaches, a long, narrow nose angled downward. It looked for the briefest of moments like a hawk’s beak.
Above that sat two wet, flinty eyes the color of January river ice, surrounded with narrowed red lids. The eyes daggered into him as if he were something of extreme disgust to be killed, wiped out. Above the eyes, two brows, as amply furred as the mustaches, jutted at the outer corners like birds’ wings about to take flight.
Atop the man’s head sat a brimmed brown felt hat adorned with all manner of items. Tucked in and dangling from strips of rawhide were flopping feathers, multicolor beads, and bits of wood. The hat’s band was of black and white hair from a creature Fletcher could not even guess at.
Fletcher tried to swallow. Despite the bone-numbing cold of the morning, a droplet of sweat slipped down his own nose and quivered at the tip, tickling him. Without much thought, he reached with his right hand to wipe it away.
The man with the gun grunted a quick, low sound, as if he was waiting for such an excuse. A gnarled hand, the one supporting the length of the barrel, adjusted its thick-fingered grip on the polished wood forestock.
Even through his fear, Fletcher smelled the sour stink of liquor wafting off the man.
“You . . .” The stranger’s voice was as his grunt had been, low and even, like steel sliding slowly across steel.
“I—”
“Shut it.”
Fletcher swallowed again and tried to stop shaking, but with no luck. The man continued to stare at him.
Fletcher let his eyes move away from the gun and the man’s hard stare and saw, below the bushy gray beard, that the man wore a buckskin tunic, grease stained and adorned with tattered fringe and spotty beadwork. The whiskey stink mingled with other smells—stale sweat, woodsmoke, gun oil, a raw animal stink earthier than the rank odor of wet dog and undercut with a rancid-meat stench—that mingled to make Fletcher’s eyes water and threatened to tease a sneeze from his dripping nose.
Finally, the man moved back from him a single step, but he held the gun as he had. Fletcher thought perhaps it was a shotgun, though his knowledge of such things began and ended at the marksman range back in his school days.
“What you doing here?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t know where here is. I’m lost. I’m a stranger here. Turned around.”
“Come from Promise?”
“Yes.” Fletcher began to nod his head and the man prodded forward with the barrel once more. Fletcher held his head still.
“Yes,” he said. “From town.”
“That decides it then.”
“What . . . decides what?”
“You’re the one, the dandy.”
“The dandy?”
The man nodded once. Then, without taking his eyes from Fletcher, he turned his head and spat a long rope of thick brown spittle to the earth. It looked to Fletcher as if he’d just deposited some of his meal. He wanted to ask if the man was ill, but then he recalled the shotgun rider’s penchant for spitting, and he realized the man was chewing tobacco.
“The one who . . .” His bushy beard waggled slightly as he chewed and spoke. It was then Fletcher noticed that around the old man’s mouth, his mustaches and beard were stained yellow and streaked with the darkest brown of the chaw juice dribbling from his mouth.
The teeth beneath the lips, what Fletcher could make out of them betwixt the flowing whiskers, were another surprise. Fletcher assumed, given the man’s brusque demeanor, that his teeth would be rotted, jagged, painful little stumps. But they were whole, somewhat yellowed, and bared as a dog might do on seeing something it despised.
The other man let the spittle dribble from his lips, further staining the hair about his mouth. “The one who”—his voice rose in pitch and his words squeaked out as his eyes wrinkled—“killed and ran!”
“What?” Fletcher’s eyes widened farther. “No! No!” He began to shake his head but the gun inched closer. “No, it wasn’t me. I tell you I didn’t do it. Let me up and I’ll explain.”
Once more, the man regained his voice. This time it was loud and thick with emotion. “You’ll explain right where you are! And where you are is your death site, I tell you, varmint from hell itself!” He chewed violently for a moment. “Killing brute! I just come from
town. I know what I know!”
“No, no, I only found her. I—”
This seemed to incite the man into a frenzy. His mouth chewed whatever god-awful thing was in there with a speed as though he were on the clock. His bushy brows rose higher and his blood-rimmed eyes bulged. His gun jammed tight, dimpling into Fletcher’s temple, forcing his head sideways until his right ear nearly touched his shoulder.
It was time to explain, for his death, Fletcher felt, was nearly upon him. He also thought that perhaps he had urinated in his trousers.
“I couldn’t kill her!”
“Why forever not?” The words were thick, loud, juiced with spittle and emotion.
Fletcher hesitated. Think, man, think! Indeed, why forever not? There was no logical reason he couldn’t have killed Millie. He was a stranger here, after all, and he had more motivation to see her dead than most, he suspected. The property was his now and he had shown anger toward her. But he had to defend himself. Think, fool! This old man is going to kill you!
“She is . . . was my aunt, for pity’s sake! I—”
“Hey?” The old man turned his fiery red-rimmed eyes on Fletcher and he thought for a moment that the man had gained twice his stature, so frightening had he become. “What’s this? Your aunt?”
All Fletcher could do was nod. He began to, then remembered that any movement elicited a near-death experience at the hands of this stinking, leather-clad mountain goat of a man.
“That makes you . . . ?”
The young dandy swallowed. “Fletcher. Fletcher J. Ralston.” Out of introductory habit, he extended a hand slowly, then paused it in midair, wondering if the man would think in the dim light that he was trying to draw a gun on him.
That was when he thought of his guns. In his bag. Of no use to him at present, nor even afterward, for he had little practical knowledge of how to use such a thing. Still, they had looked to be in good repair, not rusted, but cleaned and oiled and shiny—almost new-looking, in fact.
Ralph Compton Guns of the Greenhorn Page 8
