The kid looked to be one of a hundred other farm kids, dragged from Kansas or such to the mountains with his family a few years before. His pap likely thought he was going to strike it big in the gold fields. Instead, his family came to naught but misery.
Women fared the worst—each worked like a demon, came from living in a snake-infested soddy on the plains to a rathole of a dugout on some forsaken hillside in the mountains, all the while struggling to care for her brood of ribby children with snot noses and runny eyes and one or two still dragging on the teat.
If she didn’t kill herself with work, she crawled into a bottle beside her husband as she watched her brood die off from some sickness or other. And if she outlived them all, she wandered off, crazed, on her own.
And sometimes, if she was unlucky enough and didn’t end up starving in the wilds and ravaged by wolves or bears or mountain lions, she ended up at a hog farm, selling her disease for a few pennies a throw.
Skin Varney knew of what he spoke, as he’d been one such a boy himself. His pathetic father and addlepated mother had had too many kids, and he’d survived somehow to be tall and broad of shoulder, if not handsome.
He’d also been born smart, as he liked to think. Smart enough, at least, to walk away one day when he was fourteen and as tall as his father; he left the doomed family before they could ruin him any more than they already had.
That was the reason Skin had never taken a wife nor stooped so low as to heft a pick or shovel and scratch in a rocky hillside himself for ore. He’d reckoned himself smarter than that. He’d mined the miners instead. One slow squeeze at a time. When it came time for more money, he’d steal from someone too far from the law to do much of anything about it.
And if he got caught, he’d kill them. Threats, he knew, did nothing once your back was turned and you were walking away. People weren’t smart enough to realize he’d given them a chance to live. Soon enough, he had taken to gutting the fools and leaving an untraceable trail of dead behind.
Despite his caution, it had always surprised him that he’d not been caught. But then again, that had also served to show him he was right—people were dumber than you had any right to expect of them.
So when he’d been riding toward Promise and came upon that hollow-eyed farm boy, he’d taken a chance, wondering if the youth had been around the town long enough to know who was local. But he had, and he did.
“Tibbs? Uh, yeah, there’s an old man name of Tibbs yonder in the hills someplace. He’s sweet on the woman runs the house of fancy. Mama told me that. Told me never to talk of others, then goes and tells me that.” The kid had swung his head and smiled. “Mama, she ain’t one for taking her own advice none.”
“You lived in these parts long?” said Skin, a little bit curious about the boy now.
“Some. Since before I was growed big as I am now. Four, five years, I reckon.”
“Is your papa a miner?”
“You could say that.” Again the kid grinned and shook his head again as if at some inner joke. “He’s rootin’ in the dirt, but if he finds gold, it’ll be a miracle. Not only will it be the first gold he ever did find, but it’ll be impossible, on account of him being dead and all. That’s how I come to say he was rootin’ in the dirt.”
“You’re a funny kid,” said Skin, feeling smug at having proven once more that he was correct. The kid was doomed to dirt, digging and dying with nothing to show for it, just like his own papa.
He supposed the thing to do would be to pay the kid for the information. After all, the kid was dressed in shabby togs—trousers too short for him, shirtsleeves the same. Skin could see more dirt and holes than cloth.
Trouble was, if he gave the kid a few coins, the kid might remember him easier than if he just rode off now. But the kid did remind him of himself as a penniless fool. He reached in his saddlebag and tugged out an apple, one of several he’d taken from the crazy man and his gimpy daughter some days before.
He tossed the apple to the kid, touched his hat brim, then rode off toward Promise, assured Gunnar Tibbs was well alive off yonder. Had to be. He’d choose to believe so. Because, Skin thought, if you believe something hard enough in life, you make it so. That had to be true; otherwise, he’d not have lived through twenty-four years at Tin Falls Prison.
And now here he was, a minor but pesky bullet wound in his side from that jackass marshal. But he’d left the man and his harpy of a wife dead, and Horton Meader dead, and that bossy old crow of a whore, Millie, dead, too. Now, if he could lure Gunnar Tibbs out, he’d have killed off everybody left over from that posse that had wronged him personally. Then he could finish off the rest of Promise, maybe with a match or two.
The old woman had said Samuel Thorne—his old pard on several robberies and, most important, on the big one from that fateful night—was long gone, had left town right after the robbery.
She had no idea where he was or where his money was hidden. “Rosie’s dead, dead as dead can be. And Samuel Thorne, good riddance.” She’d made a sound in her throat as if she might spit. “Hopefully he’s dead by now, too.”
“You don’t know if he is or not?”
“You fool,” she’d said, looking up at him. “I see it in your eyes that you’re looking for revenge, nothing more. Just hollow revenge. Well, good luck, for if he is alive, he’s far from here,” she’d said, and then she had done a very funny thing.
She’d looked right at him, up from her pillows, on her very own deathbed. She’d stared into his eyes in a solid, serious way like nobody had ever done to him before, and then she’d laughed at him.
“Why is that funny?” he’d asked her, his voice thick. He’d barely been able to ask, since all he’d really wanted to do was peel her nasty old putrid head from her wrinkly neck stalk.
“The way you look so hopeful, Skin Varney!” she’d said, coughing. “It’s as if you expected Samuel Thorne to be here waiting for you, cash in hand. Begging for your forgiveness. You fool!”
She’d cackled then, and he’d done the thing he had intended to do to her anyway. He dragged his big Dag blade across her wrinkled old throat. She’d jerked, her eyes wide.
Skin had gotten a warm feeling down deep at seeing her face sag, at hearing her cackle snag and stutter into a wet cough, then a gagging and finally a gurgling sound. He hoped the old bird was in terrible pain, for she’d earned every second of it, laughing at him like that. Laid up there in her whorehouse, pretending she was something she wasn’t. Well, he’d taught her a lesson.
He would have kept on, too, maybe made the rest of her bedridden, feeble old body pay, too, but he’d heard sounds outside the room. Somebody had been on the stairs, so he’d made for the window, the same route he’d taken to get in. At the bottom, he’d pulled the ladder away from the shed roof and leaned it where he’d found it, in the dirt against the rear of the building. Then he’d hotfooted it on out of town.
He’d pushed his luck by visiting the old bird in town, but he’d had a hunch she knew something. She’d been like a mother to Sam’s girl, Rose, after all. Treated Sam like he was dirt just because he was Skin’s friend—he just knew it. So it stood to reason that Sam would have taken his girl with him that night, and he bet the old girl knew something about them, some clue about where they’d be. Which would lead him to the money.
It was only later that Skin realized that he could have played it quieter with the old woman, could have gone in through the front door and made up some story about how he was a changed man, free of prison and looking to make amends. Might be he could have gotten more information that way. But he would have been seen too soon by too many folks in Promise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The walk back to the town of Promise, Wyoming Territory, was one of much rumination on Fletcher Ralston’s part. He wasn’t certain in the least that he was doing the right thing.
He wasn’t sure
the townies, as Gunnar called them, not without a whiff of curled-lip contempt, would believe him when he told them . . . what? What, exactly, he asked himself over and over again as he trudged, was he going to tell them?
Before he left Gunnar’s cabin, he had felt certain he could convince the townsfolk that forming a posse to track down Skin was the best thing they could do. After all, he was possessed of a solid intellect due to a fine education.
But now he wasn’t so sure he would be able to convince a collective of townies that not only was he innocent of the charges they no doubt had laid against him, but they had darn well better follow his advice and help him track the killer.
He nodded in agreement with himself. “Yes, that’s the stuff, Fletcher Ralston.” Yet even that name was a lie, if what Gunnar Tibbs and the lawyer had told him was true, and he had no reason to doubt them, most certainly not Gunnar. And if that were true, then he, Fletcher Ralston, or perhaps Samuel Thorne II, was no more than one of them—a townie, a product of Promise, Wyoming Territory.
Nay, not just that. He himself was a product of the basest desires of such a base place. As if to bolster his dour mood, a large dark cloud slid slowly before the sun, shading the day and casting shadow where moments before sunlight had prevailed.
Fletcher passed a number of landmarks, boulders mostly, that he hoped appeared familiar. The last time he’d come this way, he’d been an animal on the run, hounded, he imagined, by enraged locals with burning brands in the night, armed with all manner of weapons, from blade to gun. Had that been the case? Perhaps.
Were he in their shoes, he might well feel as he suspected they did. The thought did not help his mood.
He spent his walk waffling in this manner, fluttering from one conviction to another. After he’d corrected his course twice, not certain at times of the path—after all, few people used the trails out to the wilderness, as Fletcher had come to think of the location of Gunnar’s and Horton’s cabins in the hills—he smelled woodsmoke and saw the barest haze of it through a ragged edge of leafless aspens ahead.
The town? Another cabin? He walked on, uncertain and hesitant in his steps. Then he spied a roofline and another of tall buildings, too tall to be cabins or homesteads. Finally, he found himself there above the western end of town, looking down on the cluster of buildings from a ragged spit of rock.
From the looks of it, it was a spot at which Gunnar Tibbs had stopped, too, in his comings and goings on his regular visits to Millie Jessup.
Fletcher rested a foot on a rise of reddish rock with black flecks. Granite? He didn’t know his rocks well at all. But the height was perfect for a bent knee to accommodate an elbow. He took a breather—smiling, as it sounded like a phrase the odd old man would have used—and admired the scene below.
There was much more to the town than he had remembered from the last time he’d been there. He’d never seen it from this vantage point. Along the southern edge of the main street, which ran east to west, or as he was viewing it west to east, there sat the lawyer’s office.
Chisley DeMaurier had been an interesting man, cultivated and cool in how he regarded Fletcher, kind but always assessing. He, of course, knew Fletcher’s business, the details of his life. In a way, he knew more than Fletcher did, long before Fletcher had strolled in, acting imperious and aloof.
Fletcher felt himself redden at the memory. What an oaf he’d been—demanding as if he owned the town. Instead he’d come to learn he was, in some ways, one of its baser citizens, the product of lust.
No, that was unfair; at least from his mother’s point of view, if Millie and Gunnar were to be believed, it had been love. But she had still been a prostitute. And his father had been an unscrupulous, thieving gunhand who’d robbed the very people of this town. And apparently had done so without remorse. That left Fletcher as the beneficiary to the head prostitute’s legacy, such as it was. A run-down bordello, threadbare and quaint in its way.
Fletcher sighed and sighted along the northern edge of town. There it sat, Millie’s Place, the fourth building from this end, not the tallest nor the best maintained, but solid-looking nonetheless.
As he knew the builders were wont to say, it looked to have good bones. Certainly it was finished inside to a decent degree and furnished to a certain level of finery. That had surprised him. Perhaps Millie had come from refinement back East? He would ask Gunnar.
Thought of the man and of his mission in returning to town gripped Fletcher inside and he hastened once more down the trail. Come what might, he had to help Gunnar Tibbs. No more doubts about it, he’d do whatever he had to, short of getting caught and held in town, to help his friend. But letting himself be caught would never do. He’d escaped from these people once before, had he not? He would employ the same wits to do so again. If he could not enlist help, he would take to the hills and track Gunnar and so Skin Varney, all on his own.
Even this welling of conviction ebbed within him as he trailed down the path and entered the west end of the main street of Promise, the very town he had fled as a wanted man, a murderer.
Whom to see first? The lawyer? Fletcher suspected the other man might well be sympathetic to his cause, yet he could not be certain.
To his left, a man dragged a squat barrel of something heavy, shoving and kneeing it along a loading dock. He saw Fletcher and glanced away, then swung his head back, his brows meeting. His open stare did very little to help convince Fletcher that he’d made the right choice.
Fletcher glanced back over his left shoulder and saw that the man had hastened inside what looked to be a depot office. That might well mean the man was looking for assistance to apprehend the killer returned to their midst. Oh, dear.
Fletcher groaned and beelined for the one place he knew he shouldn’t go. But it was closer than the rest—just ahead to his left, in fact.
Millie’s Place.
How ironic, he thought as he mounted the steps and knocked, looking up and down the street. I own this place and yet I wither inside to enter. He glanced once more behind him. So far, no one else seemed to be out and about. At least nearby. There was sign of people at the east end of the street, but nobody seemed to be running toward him or shooting at him. Yet.
He knocked again.
Why am I knocking? I own this place. Even that cold comfort of a thought slowed his hands, though he did reach for the knob and depressed the thumb latch. He was about to shove the door when it jerked inward, fast.
A wide-eyed woman stared at him, and he at her. It took him as long as it did her for recognition to bloom. “You!” she said. Then he knew it was Hester, the woman who had let him in that day when he’d first arrived. “You have some nerve, boy, showing up here again!” She spat the words through nearly clenched teeth. Never had Fletcher felt so very uncomfortable.
He looked to his right, eastward, and saw that the folks he’d seen from a distance were now drawing closer, moving in a determined way, four, perhaps five of them. Still too far away to know.
He looked to his left, from the direction he’d walked down into town, and there was the man he’d seen moments before, the one who had shoved the keg. But he was not alone. A burly woman strode with him, and twenty feet behind, another man was tugging on a coat, and in his other arm, he lugged a shotgun. The keg dragger wore a gun belt, one weapon on each side of his ample hips.
“Let me in, damn it!” Fletcher shouted at the woman, only mildly bothered by the fact that he had uttered a foul oath in the presence of a woman, and then shoved past her as she stumbled back in shock. She recovered quickly and grabbed for him. He expected it and shook her off, spinning on her.
“Close that door and listen to me. I’ll stand right here and keep my hands visible to you, okay?”
She stared, glared at him. But she didn’t close the door.
“It’s a matter of life and death!”
“Your life? Why shoul
d I care?”
Once more, he shoved toward her, reached past her, and slammed the door shut. She didn’t move.
“No, not mine. Well, yes, my life.” Fletcher heard sounds behind him and looked up the staircase at the several women who had gathered there, no half-dressed men in tow. Good. He backed a little toward the big clock and held up his hands at chest height, palms out. “I’m not looking for trouble,”
“Then you came to the wrong place.” Hester’s words were spoken low, through gritted teeth. Her slitted eyes told Fletcher he’d better make haste with an explanation.
“Gunnar Tibbs is in trouble and I need help.”
“What? What did you do to Gunnar?” She clenched and unclenched her fists, glanced quickly to the women on the stairs behind him. He edged farther back, keeping the clock to his back so that he might be able to see them, too.
“Skin Varney.”
He heard breath drawn in, as if the very name he’d uttered was that of someone who held them in his grip, yet feared and reviled in equal measure.
“What about him?” The woman who asked in little more than a breathy whisper was Dominique, if Fletcher recalled correctly. This time she was fully dressed. Around her eyes, red puffiness belied the fact that she’d been in the midst of tears when he arrived. A woman next to her rubbed her on the shoulder.
“Well,” said Fletcher. “He’s a killer and a thief. He’s the one who robbed the town twenty-four years ago with . . . Samuel Thorne.”
“You mean, your father,” said Hester. She didn’t take her eyes from him.
Finally he nodded. “Yes. Okay, fine. But look, I didn’t come here to tell you things you already know. Gunnar told me the whole story about what happened that night. And then he told me that Skin Varney has been released from prison and is free once more.”
No response. Then there was a loud knocking on the door. Hester looked at him, then at the door, then back to him. “You’d best keep talking.”
Ralph Compton Guns of the Greenhorn Page 19
