“What’s going on up there?” It was the deputy.
Gunnar wiped at his cheek a last time, checked his palm—it was bloody, but nothing serious. He’d live. He could still hear and see, so he reckoned he’d survive. He wanted to live long enough to back McDoughty into a corner and beat on the man something fierce. He’d rarely felt that way about anyone in his life, but something about the smarmy lawdog annoyed him to no end.
But right then there was no room for that pettiness. They were all treading water in this river together.
Then Reg McDoughty’s black hat worked into view. “Get down, you fool!” shouted Gunnar.
The man did, ducking down behind a rock, for all of two or three seconds. Then he popped up from behind the rock once more. “Skin Varney! Don’t shoot—I’m unarmed!”
“What in hell are you playing at, Reg?” growled Gunnar, not twelve feet from the man. “He’s crazy with that gun, and you know it!”
If the lawdog heard him, he didn’t respond. “Skin! It’s Reg McDoughty, the acting marshal!”
Now he’s taking over the entire department, thought Gunnar. Just because Joe Pooler’s laid up again with the gout.
“Skin, now look. My hands are up. I only want to talk!”
For long moments, no sound could be heard, save for a quick breeze rustling through the big tips of the ponderosas. Then Varney said, “What you want?”
“We all know what I want, Skin. For you to lay down that gun of yours and give yourself up. This ain’t no way to end your days, mister! Because that’s what will happen. And for what? For some money?”
“Nope! For revenge! I want Sam Thorne’s head on a pole, damn it!”
“We all want that, Skin. Now look. If you give yourself up and we talk this all through, I expect it will go a whole lot easier on you with the judge than if you were to try to kill any of us here. Big ol’ difference between killing a man and stealing his money. One’s a stint in the jail. One’s a quick jerk on a short rope. You ever heard what a neck snapping sounds like, Skin? Like you was snapping up sticks to start a fire. Only there’s but the one snap. Then that’s it.”
As he spoke, Gunnar saw that McDoughty held his hands up still, yet they were slowly creeping back down, either out of laziness or else he had some strange idea of drawing down on Varney, a man who could see him but whom the daft lawman could not see.
That was when the oddness began—Skin started talking. “I never wanted trouble from this!” he shouted as if his statement was an accusation leveled at them all. Gunnar heard a scuffing sound and peered to his right, past the boulders where he hoped Horton was still holed up and doing okay.
Beyond that he saw a fawn-color hat moving slowly along. It was one of the posse men, slinking, cutting wide. He’d better keep himself quiet. Then Gunnar saw another cutting to his left, far and wide. How many were there?
If all of them had come with McDoughty, that meant ten men were right now trying to surround Skin Varney. Gunnar hoped for his and Horton’s sake that the fools held their trigger fingers stiff and straight and not trembling.
“Hell, it was all Thorne’s fault.”
“What was?” said the deputy.
“The robbery, you fool!” Skin stopped talking then, for he realized at about the same time all the rest of the men did that McDoughty had tricked him into admitting for the first time that he’d had a hand in the robbery.
Up until then, it had been the word of two people at the crime scene who’d sworn on a Bible as to the identities of both thieves. Now they had genuine proof from Skin’s mouth.
Thorne had been identified by lots more folks because he’d thundered on out of town that night, looking strangely bereft of any load of cash. And that left a whole lot of folks wondering where he’d buried the loot. In town or just outside of it? In the coming months, everybody in town had become suspicious of everyone else. Lots of folks had been seen at odd hours wandering around with shovels.
The only one who seemed to keep herself above the childish behavior in Promise had been Millie Jessup. Gunnar couldn’t understand it, but he respected her all the more for it.
Something irked Skin, for they heard a growling sound and he spat in disgust. Then he opened up once more. Bullets spanged off rocks; a fresh volley of moans arose from over Horton’s way behind the far boulders to Gunnar’s right.
Through this all, the acting top lawdog, Reg McDoughty, quickly lost his nerve, tucked low, and flopped to his left. He collapsed down onto his shoulder as if he’d been shot, then sort of rolled himself behind cover. Trouble was, he was still a good five to six feet from the rock when he popped upright again.
Somehow, it worked, because instead of seeing a bleeding fool in the dirt, Gunnar watched as Reg popped up, realized he was still a couple of feet shy of his goal, and finished scooching to his left, where he hid behind the safety of the near boulder.
That was when the shooting from both sides ceased. For long minutes, nobody heard a thing. Finally, Horton shouted, “Help! My eye!”
Several of the men prairie-dogged up and showed their heads as they scouted. No shots—which would have been easy as pie for Skin to make—were taken. He was gone, had to be. But where and how?
He’d slipped by, no doubt, between the posse men before they could close in on him. All that palaver had been a ruse to allow him to skedaddle. And it had worked. McDoughty began shouting orders while Gunnar slipped away and followed Skin’s path.
Meanwhile, back at the rock pile, Horton tried to stanch the blood oozing from the wound Skin had delivered to him. He was a mess, as Gunnar would later find out—Horton had been shot in the eye.
One of the men, Jasper Winkins, fancied himself a bit of a doctor, as he wasn’t squeamish once the blood spilled. The other men had been more than happy to have him tend to the yowler’s ills. They held him down and Jasper, not a light man, knelt on Horton’s wiry if muscled chest.
“What you gonna do to me with those?”
Winkins had fashioned a pair of tweezers, whittled from a springy forked pine branch, and they descended on the thrashing man’s face with not a little smile. “Tighten up, Horton! I’m about to cure your ills.”
“I ain’t got no ills!”
“That’s rich, coming from a man covered in his own blood.”
To the surprise of them all, not the least of whom was Horton himself, Jasper’s remedy worked. Sort of. He probed the whimpering man’s eyeball, the lids of which had been pulled wide by the grubby hands of Stanislaus Corrs, farrier and amateur taxidermist.
Winkins plucked from the corner of Horton’s eye a lead slug big as a navy bean, though not quite as long, and held it up between two bloody fingertips. He looked down at Horton. “I expect you can see now.”
But the slug had done some sort of damage to something stringy, and apparently vital, behind the eyeball. The eye, once it had stopped bleeding and had healed as much as it ever would, never regained its true purpose.
In fact, its former deep brown coloring would soon turn a shocking milky gray, and Delia, one of the women at Millie’s, claimed it was “interesting,” while the eyeball gave the rest of them the willies. Horton soon thereafter took to wearing a patch he fashioned out of scrap leather.
He fancied it gave him a daring look, but few others thought so. Delia showed less interest in him. Eventually she took up with a limping drummer of millinery and left town in the night some years after the eyeball incident. She returned in the night less than a year later.
Horton secretly cursed Jasper Winkins, the self-styled medical man, but only for two years, because Jasper, having treated a family traveling through for what he called “some minor pox or other” came down himself with it shortly after the four-member family (a mother, a father, an old woman, and a young boy) all died.
No one could be certain whether the family’s skinny ox and
two bony chickens might not also be carriers of the dread pox, so they, too, were dispatched and buried alongside the family, along with all their possessions.
Miss Houlihan, a musical-minded schoolmarm, had lamented the pretty parlor organ that the poxy family had actually found on the trail west of St. Louis. It had been set carefully by the side of the trail, as if someone might come back for it at any time.
Unfortunately, by the time the poxy family came along, the organ was far from playable. Dust and rain had sprung the hide-glued stops, keys, and hammers. In the end, Miss Houlihan decided against attempting a rescue of the organ, but nonetheless wept as dirt covered it over.
Frustrated medical man Jasper Winkins died alone mere days later, racked with chills and hallucinating he was a distant cousin of St. Jerome. At the man’s service, Horton secretly vowed to stop blaming Jasper for the loss of sight in that eye. Sure, Winkins had been a blowhard and a fake doctor, so it had been easy to fix blame on him, but Horton knew Skin Varney was the real culprit.
Though they’d been friends for several years before the Skin Varney incident, Horton Meader and Gunnar Tibbs became better friends in the weeks and months following, and so Horton learned of Gunnar’s experiences that afternoon with such detail that he felt as though he had been there. In later years, he came to think he had.
Of the immediate proceedings at the little rocky knob northwest of town that day of the posse ride, Gunnar was ignorant, as he’d taken off silently after Skin himself. He resented the notion that the big, gun-handy lummox was making a fool of him and the rest of them, and he vowed to apprehend Skin himself or lay him low in the effort. Mostly he lit out after Skin to show up Reg McDoughty, the annoying lawdog who’d of late taken to spending time with Millie Jessup. This sat poorly in the craw of Gunnar Tibbs.
On that day, Gunnar hoped Horton wasn’t injured too badly, but as Reg had been slow in assessing the situation and dithering to figure out how best to proceed, Gunnar did what he felt he did best—he worked alone.
Skin was on foot and so Gunnar would be, too. He’d retrieve his horse later. Skin was an idiot and didn’t know it, and Gunnar reasoned he could use this knowledge to his advantage.
The man didn’t have much of a start on him, but since Skin had been out there living rough, at least for the week or so since the robbery, perhaps longer, he had the advantage over Gunnar. He had not roved that particular parcel of the woods and high places in several years, and then only in pursuit of a mule deer he’d failed to drop with his first shot.
They were high up, lost and nested in these piney foothills. Now and again he’d come across scout rummagings where miners such as himself had sunk test holes to search for color. That there were a number of them and none of them bore recent sign of the usual occupants, all elbows and backsides as they dug away for gold, told Gunnar this hill wasn’t likely to offer up a living wage, let alone a sudden fortune.
Every fifty feet or so, Gunnar stopped and cocked an ear. From behind, he heard no sound of the townsmen, a fact for which he was grateful. As to the trail ahead, though Skin was attempting to disguise his trail, he left behind boot prints pressed into the dry earth here and there, enough that any dolt could follow.
Getting reckless, thought Gunnar. That was when he heard a hammer being pulled back.
“You ease off, Tibbs. I want to be left alone and that’s all. But it’s possible I’ve killed men before, and it don’t trouble me none to do it again.”
Gunnar cursed himself for paying such close attention to sign. He should have known it had been too simple.
“I admire your sand, Skin, but if you didn’t have anything to do with the robbery, as you been saying, then why not go back to town with us and tell the judge?”
“Ha! All they’d do is string me up anyway. They’re fixing for a fight.”
“Nah, Skin. Ain’t none of us on the posse wants to see your neck stretched. We just want our money back.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Gunnar. I’m innocent as a lamb.”
It took much of Gunnar’s strength to not laugh out loud. Skin was a lot of things, but lamblike was at the bottom of that list. And Gunnar suspected Skin was not a man who tolerated laughter in his face, not when he had a sight line on you.
“Then why are you running, Varney?” As he said it, Gunnar turned, his rifle held by the forestock in his left hand, arms ready to jerk down, tuck in, and lever a round while he spun.
He dropped low and a shot knocked his hat off. He cursed and dropped lower and scurried on his belly to a nearby pine. “You’re giving yourself away again by shooting, Skin. Why don’t we talk about this?”
“I see you, Tibbs. Next shot will part your hair.”
“You kill me and they’ll surely hang you. Right now there’s no killing on your plate! There’s even the chance you can convince them you didn’t have nothing to do with that robbery.”
“You heard McDoughty. He tricked me into saying I was there. Talking’s over with. I’m going now! You stay put and don’t tail me, or you’re done!”
Gunnar heard his rapid boot steps clunking across rock, crunching sticks, then a peculiar hollow sound . . . then a shout, a curse, an “Oh, no!” then a thud.
Gunnar held his spot hugging the earth, his chin hairs resting on pine duff. “Skin!”
No reply.
“Skin? You hurt?”
No reply.
Gunnar lay there a few more long moments, then sighed. He pushed up to his knees, still clutching the rifle, and eyeballed the terrain. Beyond, from where Skin had been yammering, the earth appeared to drop off, angled downhill.
Gunnar crept closer to the drop-off and peered over.
As drops went, it wasn’t much of one. The slope could have been traversed to the gravelly bottom some fifteen to twenty feet below by switchbacking. But Skin Varney had instead tried to tempt fate by scampering across the ravine, a mere thirty or thirty-five feet, aboard an old, long-fallen ponderosa pine that had felt the prickly bites of thousands of pine beetles.
Though he guessed that any strength the old fallen tree once possessed had long since been gnawed away, it wasn’t a sudden, sickening crack that Gunnar had heard.
By the time Skin had clambered aboard, the trunk’s bark had loosened such that his frantic boot steps had shoved it this way and that, sloughing it apart like the shell off a hard-boiled egg.
The bark came away in great smeared-off rafts, dropping a dozen feet to the dry wash below. Skin had no doubt crab-walked too far out to turn or lunge back when his smooth leather boot soles began to slide.
From the position of his body down below, he’d likely spent his few last seconds upright windmilling atop the log, hence the curse Gunnar had heard. Then the outlaw had slipped and fallen, landing in a sprawl at the bottom between boulders.
He would no doubt have smacked his head open like a raw egg, but he’d found the best possible spot on which to drop: an earthy, dusty patch, home of a handful of stray grasses gone brown in the late season. His rifle lay snapped in half some feet beyond his reaching yet still right hand. The outlaw’s dust-caked black hat had popped off and lay crown up an impressive dozen feet away.
From his vantage point, Gunnar Tibbs thought perhaps Skin had broken an ankle, given the unintended jut of the lower half of his left boot. That the man had also not broken his neck was not yet known.
Gunnar grunted and scrambled and slid down to the bottom of the ravine. “Simple as that, you stupid bastard,” he muttered as he approached the unmoving man with his rifle at the ready.
He prodded Skin’s shoulder. The man jostled from the touch but did not respond with his own effort. Gunnar grew bolder and stepped to within easy snatching distance of Skin’s left hand. It did not snatch at him.
“Hey,” said the bearded miner. “Wake up, Varney!”
Nothing.
>
“You dead?”
A sound came to him then—a groan.
“Hey!” shouted Gunnar once more.
A wheeze rose up from the prone man.
“Damn,” said Gunnar. “Too much to hope you’d ended yourself with good grace. Now you’re just plain stupid again.” He sighed and kicked the gasping man on the shoulder. “Get up and face your fate, Varney.”
The big man shoved up slowly to his shaking elbows and even more slowly shook his curly black-haired mess of hair. He groaned again, and when he tried to drag his legs into a useful position, he cut loose with a volley of sounds he’d intended as words, but came out as the whimpers of an animal in pain.
“Serves you right for being dumb enough to try to cross this ravine like a squirrel instead of thinking like a man.”
“Huh?”
Gunnar sighed. “Hm. I reckon you’ve taken a nasty knock to the bean.”
The dazed, ground-bound man shook his head slowly once more, as if he were a grizzly waking from a long winter’s nap. Despite his obvious confusion and discomfort, Gunnar noticed Skin’s right hand slithering from the ground to his hip, toward the sheath knife that rode there.
Gunnar thumbed back the rifle to the deadly position and pointed its snout at Skin’s head, three feet away. “No, sir! No, sir, I say! My word, but you are a piece of lamentable work, Skin Varney. You hold right there and don’t even think of touching that knife or I will pop a hole in that thick skull of yours.”
“Aw, Gunnar Tibbs, just let me go. I tell you true: So help me, you won’t never see me nor hear from me again.”
Gunnar hated to admit it even to himself, but the ease of such a task, simply doing nothing, was mighty tempting. He mulled it over for several seconds. It was pause enough that Skin thought perhaps he’d gotten a boot in the door, so he opened his mouth again.
“I’m not funning you, Gunnar. I won’t make a peep around these parts ever again.”
Watching Skin Varney mewl on the ground before him repulsed Gunnar, made him think of all the times when he’d seen Varney slobbering about Promise. He was usually half in his cups, harassing folks in Chalkey’s Saloon or talking rough to one of the women at Millie’s.
Ralph Compton Guns of the Greenhorn Page 12
