THE WICKED DIE TWICE
A SLASH AND PECOS WESTERN
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CHAPTER 1
When Town Marshal Glenn Larsen reined up in front of the jailhouse on Dry Fork’s main street very early on a Sunday morning in early July, a cold stone dropped in his belly. He could tell by the look on the dark, craggy face of his deputy, Henry Two Whistles, that trouble was afoot.
As the older man, clad in a three-piece suit that hung a little loosely on his lean frame, stepped out through the jailhouse door, a fateful cast to his molasses-dark eyes was undeniable. Not that Two Whistles was ever all that given to merriment. He was three-quarters Ute from southern Colorado Territory, and he was true to the stoic nature of his people.
As he closed the jailhouse door and turned to face Larsen reining up before him on the marshal’s sweat-lathered coyote dun gelding, the old man rested his double-barreled Parker twelve-gauge on his right shoulder.
“Anyone hurt . . . killed?” Larsen asked before Two Whistles could say anything, the marshal’s voice pitched with dread.
Two Whistles frowned curiously, deep lines wrinkling the dark-cherry tone of his forehead and spoking around his eyes.
Larsen canted his head toward his back trail. “I was on my way back to town last night when I met three Milliron Ranch hands. I thought it was a mite odd to see Milliron hands heading back out to their headquarters so early on a Saturday night, and said as much. They told me that Talon Chaney and ’HellRaisin” Frank Beecher had come to town, an’ were sort of makin’ all the stock hands homesick. They decided to cut out early and avoid gettin’ caught in a lead storm.”
Two Whistles gave a grim, stony-faced nod. “That damn Cut-Head Sioux is with ’em, too—Black Pot.”
“Gabriel Black Pot,” Larsen said as he swung down from his saddle. “Yeah, they mentioned him, too. He’s an aptly named son of the devil, ain’t he? There ain’t one thing that ain’t black about him, especially his heart.”
Henry pursed his lips. “How bad, Henry?”
The old deputy lifted and lowered his left shoulder. “Not bad. This time. They came in late yesterday afternoon. Been holed up at Carlisle’s place. All the ranch hands and everyone else in town know’em well enough by now that they cleared out of Carlisle’s as soon as Beecher’s bunch bellied up to the bar.”
“Not great for business, are they?”
“At least no one’s dead. Not yet. They slapped around a couple girls, made ’em dance with ’em while Carlisle played the piano, but they was drunk when they rode into town, so by ten, eleven o’clock, they went upstairs an’ passed out with a couple of Carlisle’s doxies.”
“That was nice of them.” Larsen sighed. “When I heard they were here, I expected the worst.”
Two Whistles’s thick-lipped mouth rose in a grim smile. “That would likely happen today, when they get goin’ again. As Carlisle tells it, they’re flush. An’ it don’t look like they’re gonna let any of that stagecoach money burn holes in their pockets.”
The three killers, along with the rest of their twentyman bunch, recently ran down a stagecoach hauling treasure from Deadwood to Sundance. They raped the women aboard the stage, killed the men, including the jehu and the shotgun messenger, stole the gold and the ranch payroll in the strongbox, and ran the stage off a cliff.
The gang split up the gold and separated.
Larsen had been surprised that Chaney, Beecher, and Black Pot had had the gall to show their faces in any town so soon after a holdup, but in a town so close to the scene of their crime most of all. On the other hand, he wasn’t all that surprised. Those three killers in particular had reputations for being spitin-your-face brazen about their wicked ways.
Maybe they felt they’d earned the privilege. They were known to have killed three deputy U.S. marshals and a couple of sheriffs who’d tried to run them to ground over the years, and double that many bounty hunters who’d hounded the gang for the bounties on their heads.
They probably hadn’t hesitated to head to Dry Fork because they knew an unproven town marshal and his just as unproven, old-man, half-breed deputy were manning the jailhouse these days. Glenn Larsen and Henry Two Whistles had both been working out at the Crosshatch Ranch up until only seven months ago, when the rancher they’d worked for, Melvin Wheelwright, died suddenly from a heart stroke. His family had sold the ranch to an eastern syndicate, and that company’s head honcho decided to hire an entire new bunkhouse of hands, despite every one being as seasoned as any other thirty-a-month-and-found cowpuncher anywhere in the territory.
Funny folks, those tailor-dressed syndicate men, most of whom were foreigners, of course. Maybe that was the explanation right there....
Two of those hands given their time, a sack of grub, and one horse each to ride away on were Larsen and Two Whistles. Henry had been the Crosshatch cook since his bronco-busting days had gone the way of the buffalo, leaving him with a rickety left hip and a pronounced limp in cold weather. Larsen and Two Whistles had gotten to be good friends over the four years they’d worked together at the Crosshatch, even though Larsen now being only twenty-seven and Two Whistles somewhere in his fifties (though he’d never said where exactly) were separated by nearly thirty years in age. It just seemed natural that, when the two lone wolves left the headquarters and neither had anyone else in their lives, and nowhere else to go, that they’d ride nowhere together.
The nearest town was Dry Fork, so they’d headed there for a drink or two to drown their sorrows. It just so happened the town had been in need of a new marshal and a deputy and, since no one else had seemed to want the dangerous jobs, here the two former Crosshatch men were now, sporting five-point town marshal’s stars.
Not only had a job been awaiting Glenn Larsen, but a pretty girl, as well. The first moment he’d lain eyes on the mercantiler’s comely daughter, Tiffanie Bright, he’d tumbled head over heels. To his astonishment, it had turned out that she’d felt the same way about him, so against Tiffanie’s family’s wishes, they’d been hitched inside of two months. Now they had a neat little frame house, which her father had staked them to, on the corner of Main Street and Third.
Larsen was eager to head home to his pretty wife now, as he’d been away for the past three days, looking for the two men who’d stolen stock from a local feed barn, and he knew Tiffanie was worried about him.
First things first.
“All right,” he said now, sliding his Winchester carbine from his saddle sheath. “They’re over at Carlisle’s, you say?”
“That’s where they are, all right. Carlisle’s swamper has been keepin’ me updated. I wasn’t gonna make a move on ’em till you showed up. Not unless they started shootin’ up the place anyways. I didn’t even show myself, knowin’ that would only provoke ’em.”
“No, no, I’m glad you didn’t. Hell, Bill Tilghman wouldn’t make a play on that bunch solo. An’ there’s no point in provokin’ ’em and risking other folks’ lives.”
“So you’re sayin’ I ain’t just a coward?” Henry gave a rare smile.
“No more than me, anyway.” Larsen gave a droll chuckle and slowly, quietly jacked a round into his Winchester’s action, as though the three brigands might hear the metallic rasp from all the way over at Carlisle’s Saloon, two blocks away. “I wouldn’t go it alone against them three. I sure will be happy to have them under lock and key—I’ll tell you that much, Henry. When I took this job, I didn’t think I’d be facing the likes of Talon Chaney!”
Again, Larsen chuckled. It was a nervous chuckle. He had the jitters, all right, and no mistake. His knees felt a little spongy, and his hands were sweating inside his buckskin gloves. He hadn’t felt this nervy since the night before his wedding.
Tiffanie.
He sure hoped he made it through this morning in one piece, so he could see his lovely bride again. Thinking of her, of walking over to their little house on the corner of Main and Third, and sitting down
to breakfast with her, after he had the three killers under lock and key, calmed his nerves a bit.
He kept her image in the back of his mind, and the image of their peaceful, cheerful, sunlit morning kitchen, as well, as he said, “All right, Henry. Let’s do this. Me, I’m ready for breakfast.”
“Really?” Henry said as they walked east along the main street, keeping to the boardwalks on the north side. “I couldn’t eat a thing. In fact, I feel a little off my feed.” He winced and pressed a hand to the middle-aged bulge of his belly.
“Truth be told, I was just jawin’.” Larsen glanced at the older man walking beside him. “Right now, just the thought of food makes me a little ill.”
“Yeah,” Henry said.
As the two men walked along, spurs clanging softly, boot heels scuffing the worn boards of the sidewalk, Larsen saw that the street was deserted. That was strange. It was almost eight o’clock.
Normally, there would be some wagon traffic at this hour. Housewives would be strolling toward Mergen’s Grocery Store for fresh eggs and cream. Children would be tramping in small groups toward the schoolhouse on the town’s west end, bouncing lunch sacks off their thighs, the little boys triggering tree branch guns at each other or at imaginary Indians, the little girls whispering delicious secrets and giggling.
At the very least, a shopkeeper or two would be out sweeping the boardwalks fronting their stores, or arranging displays of their goods.
There was nothing but soft morning sunshine, a few small birds darting here and there, the light morning breeze kicking up little swirls of dust. Otherwise, the street was deserted.
Larsen didn’t even see one of the town’s mongrels heading home after a night in the countryside or hunting along the creek, a dead rabbit in its jaws. Occasionally, he saw a face in one of the store windows as he passed—a shopkeeper stealing a cautious glance into the street before letting a curtain drop back into place and scuttling back into the shadows, wary of catching a stray bullet.
Word had gotten around, of course.
Three of the nastiest killers ever to haunt the North Platte country were in town. Folks had learned that the three killers were at Carlisle’s, and that the town’s two unlikely lawmen, Glenn Larsen and Henry Two Whistles, were going to make a play on them....
Larsen and Two Whistles stopped on the corner of Main Street and Wyoming Avenue, and turned to face Carlisle’s standing on the adjacent corner, on the other side of the main drag. It was a sprawling, white-painted, clapboard, three-story affair with a broad front porch. Larsen had never thought the place had looked particularly menacing. Just another saloon—one of three in the little settlement of Dry Fork, though the largest and the one with the prettiest doxies, as well as the best cook. Magnus Carlisle wasn’t known to water down his whiskey, either, so his saloon and “dance hall,” which was mostly just a euphemism for “whorehouse,” was favored by men who could afford his slightly higher prices.
Now, however, Larsen would be damned if Carlisle’s didn’t look like a giant powder keg sporting a lit fuse.
He turned to his deputy. “You ready, Henry?”
“No,” Two Whistles said, staring without expression at the saloon across the street.
“Yeah,” Larsen said. “Me neither.”
Squeezing the rifle in his hands, Larsen stepped into the street.
* * *
Larsen and Henry approached Carlisle’s, whose porch and front door faced the street corner, the front of the building forming a pie-shaped wedge. A large sign over the porch announced simply CARLISLE’S in ornate green letters outlined in red and gold. Larsen felt his heart picking up its pace. The young man who had been sitting tipped back in a chair near the saloon’s louvred front doors dropped the chair’s front legs to the floor with a quiet thump and rose slowly.
That was Eddie Black, the curly-haired young swamper who had been relaying information about the cutthroats to Two Whistles at the jailhouse.
Eddie moved forward, and as the two lawmen stepped up onto the boardwalk fronting the porch, he came quickly down the broad wooden steps, eyes blazing anxiously. He was of medium height and skinny, and he wore a black wool vest over a white shirt adorned with a red cravat stained with beer and the tobacco juice he emptied from the saloon’s brass spittoons.
He was “a little soft in his thinker box,” as the saying went, and he sported a bushy thatch of curly red hair. He wasn’t really as young as he seemed; Larsen had heard he was somewhere in his thirties. But his simple-mindedness made him seem much younger.
Breathless, he stopped before the two lawmen and said, “You gonna take ’em down, Marshal?” He grinned delightedly but also a little fearfully. He was fairly shaking with excitement.
Larsen and Two Whistles shared a glance, then the marshal said, “Well, we’re gonna give it a try, Eddie. You’d best wait out here, all right?”
“Oh, don’t you worry! I know who them fellas are!” Eddie scampered off to the left along the boardwalk and crouched down behind a rain barrel at the big building’s far front corner. He looked cautiously over the top, as if he were expecting hell to pop at any second.
The young man’s anxiety increased Larsen’s. He shared another look with Two Whistles, and saw that the swamper’s demeanor had had a similar effect on the normally stone-faced Ute. Henry’s eyes were a little darker than usual. He was also a little pale, and sweat beaded his forehead, just beneath the brim of his black bullet-crowned hat.
Larsen adjusted the set of his own tan Stetson, then, opening and closing his hands around his rifle, he and Henry started up the porch steps. There were around a dozen steps, but it felt like a long climb. Finally, the lawmen pushed through the batwings and stepped into the saloon’s cool shadows.
CHAPTER 2
“Damn!” a voice exclaimed.
Jerking his rifle up suddenly, Larsen turned to see Magnus Carlisle standing behind the bar just ahead and on the marshal’s left. The man had been rolling a quirley, but apparently the two lawmen’s sudden appearance in the front entrance had spooked him. He’d dropped his rolling paper and tobacco onto the polished mahogany bar top.
Larsen gave a soft sigh of relief and lowered the rifle.
Glaring at Larsen and Two Whistles, the portly, bespectacled saloon owner said, “You scared the hell out of me!”
Keeping his voice down, Larsen said, “Didn’t you hear us comin’ up the steps?”
“No!”
Larsen hadn’t realized that he and Henry had been walking almost as quietly as two full-blood Indian braves on the warpath, but apparently they had. He glanced at Henry, who shrugged and gave a wry quirk of his upper lip.
Turning back to the saloon owner, Larsen said, “They still upstairs?”
“Yep,” Carlisle said darkly, looking over the tops of his round, steel-rimmed spectacles. “Been there all damn night. You sure took your own sweet time getting here.”
Larsen felt his face warm with anger. “I got back to town as quickly as I could, Mr. Carlisle,” he crisply replied. And he nearly killed his horse doing it, he did not add. “Which room are they in?”
“Third floor. The big room all the way down on the end, right side of the hall. It overlooks the street. You better hope like hell they didn’t see you walking over here.” Carlisle narrowed an anxious eye and said, “They could be layin’ in there waitin’ for you.”
“We’ll handle it,” Larsen said as he and Two Whistles walked along the bar, heading for the broad staircase at the room’s rear. The young marshal hoped he’d sounded more confident than he felt.
Carlisle followed them, running a hand along the bar. “Take no chances, Glenn. If they get past you, they’ll come down here and tear into me. There won’t be enough of me left to bury!”
“Keep your voice down, Mr. Carlisle,” Larsen said levelly, keeping his own voice just above a whisper.
“Shoot ’em through the door! Just shoot ’em through the door!”
As both lawmen sto
pped at the bottom of the stairs, Two Whistles turned to the saloon owner and said, “Don’t they have a couple girls up there?”
Carlisle stared at him thoughtfully and blinked. He looked a little sheepish. “Yeah, I reckon they do. Claudine and Sally Jane. Still, though, fellas, shoot ’em through the door. Please! Don’t take no chances. Claudine an’ Sally Jane would understand!”
Larsen and Two Whistles shared a cynical glance and then started up the stairs.
Behind them, leaning forward and pushing his pudgy right hand against the bar top, Carlisle rasped, “Shoot ’em through the door! Don’t take no chances! Hell, they’ll burn the whole town down! You know how they are!”
Larsen whipped his head back to the frightened man and pressed two fingers to his lips. Carlisle just stared up at him, looking anguished. Turning forward again, Larsen and Two Whistles kept moving slowly up the stairs, keeping their eyes forward. At one point, Larsen’s right spur jingled. He stopped, glanced at Henry, and then the two men wordlessly, quietly removed the spurs from their boots and left both pairs on that very step.
Spurless, they resumed their climb, crossing the second-floor landing, then continuing to the third floor.
Slowly, quietly, almost holding their breaths, they made their way down the third-floor hall, which was dingy and sour-smelling and lit by only the one dirty window at the far end. As they walked side by side, Larsen holding his Winchester up high across his chest, Two Whistles holding his Parker the same way, the marshal kept his eyes glued to the last door on the hall’s right side.
He pricked his ears, listening.
The building was as silent as a tomb. There were still no sounds on the street. It was as quiet as Sunday morning when the whole town was in either of the two churches—the Lutheran or the Catholic.
A door clicked on the hall’s right side. The lawmen stopped suddenly.
Nathan Stark, Army Scout Page 28
