The Murdock's Law Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1

  The hearse was drawn by a pair of arrogant-looking matched blacks with coats that shone like stretched satin, plumed bridles, and the general appearance of never having been whipped up above a trot. Black bunting framed the casket between the side windows, an expensive affair of polished mahogany with gold-plated handles under a mound of lilies and hyacinth. The driver, a square, rough-handed Irishman whose nose glowed redder than the early spring chill dictated, looked bored and thirsty. The fellow beside him, rotund in a black cutaway, striped trousers, and a high silk hat screwed down to the eyes, looked inconsolable. I took him for the undertaker. The richer they get the sadder they look.

  There was a respectable procession behind, led by a gray-whiskered preacher and a stout, middle-aged woman weeping behind a black veil, but before they reached my end of the street I stepped inside to avoid having to doff my hat. After living in it for four days I wasn’t so sure my scalp wouldn’t peel off with it.

  A bell mounted overhead jangled when I closed the door. Racks of rifles and shotguns lined the walls of the shop, their straight black barrels glistening smugly in the light streaming in through the big front window. Standing out from the walls, woodenframed glass cases containing more firearms in various stages of assembly formed a square within a square. The place smelled sharply of lubricating oil.

  Behind the cases, at a bench littered with springs and rags and short screws and miscellaneous instruments, a scrawny old man was filing the rough edges off the inside of a rifle barrel clamped in a wooden vise. He said without turning that he’d be with me directly. His Swedish accent would sink a ferry.

  “Who died?” I asked.

  “Town marshal.” The file rasped shrilly against the jagged steel.

  “Shot?”

  “Choked on a piece of steak.”

  I wondered if he was joking. He didn’t strike me as the type. “That must have come as a surprise in this town. I hear folks around here raise some hell from time to time.”

  “From time to time.”

  “Not that I’ve seen any evidence of it.”

  He squatted to peer inside the barrel. His profile was clean but beginning to blur under the chin. He wore a massive blond moustache streaked with white that swept to the corners of his jaw and appeared to have sucked all the hair from the top of his bald head.

  “What’d you expect, shooting?” he said then. “All day long, every day, like you read in the penny dreadfuls? There ain’t that much lead in Montana.” He blew through the barrel and scraped a thick finger around inside. Apparently satisfied, he straightened and turned to face me. His gray-blue eyes took me in swiftly from dusty crown to caked spurs. “What’s your business?”

  “Page Murdock. I wired you last week from Helena looking for a Deane-Adams. You said you had one.”

  “Hell of a long ride just for a gun.”

  “I was coming anyway.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You some kind of law?”

  “Does it show?”

  “You could be on one side or the other, from the look of you. In this business I see my share of both.”

  “Maybe you’ve seen Chris Shedwell lately,” I said. “My boss got a report he’s on his way here. He’s wanted for a mail-train robbery near Wichita two years ago.”

  He shook his head. “Thought you boys favored those.” He indicated the Army Colt in my holster. “Deane-Adams only shoots five.”

  “I know. I used to own one.”

  “You only got four if you keep the chamber under the hammer empty,” he pointed out.

  “I don’t.”

  “Shoot your foot off someday.” He drew a ring of keys from his pocket and bent to unlock a drawer in the bottom of the case between us. From its depths he lifted a skeletal piece and handed it to me.

  It was a slim, lightweight .45 with an octagonal barrel, a smooth cylinder, and a skinny butt showing no more curve than a spinster’s bodice. It looked exactly like the one I had lost the year before somewhere on the tracks between Fargo and Bismarck, except that this one had a mother-of-pearl grip.

  “Who ruined it?” I asked.

  “Tinhorn from Minnesota. He won it at stud and paid me to fit the new grip. Never picked it up. Miner caught him shaving the ace of clubs and carved him up with a pocketknife. They buried him in pieces.”

  “How soon can I have it refitted?”

  “Tomorrow. Be twenty dollars for the gun and the work. Half in advance.”

  I gave him ten and got a receipt.

  After the comparative silence of the shop, the noise on the street was terrific. Once a mining town, Breen had died when the vein east of the Smith River played out, only to be born again as the cattle industry stretched into the foothills between the Big and Little Belt Mountains. Merchants had swarmed in armed with canned goods and coal oil and curtain material and all the other paraphernalia of eastern culture, just as they had in countless other boomtowns across the Northwest in the eighteen-seventies, so that you couldn’t tell Helena from Sutter’s Mill, Bismarck from Dodge. I washed the taste of civilization out of my mouth in one of fourteen saloons that faced each other across a street as wide as a pasture and got directions to the marshal’s office.

  It was a solid affair built of logs, with weatherboard on the outside to give visitors the impression that it wasn’t. A square of brown butcher paper was nailed to the door with GONE TO THE FUNERAL penciled across it in an educated hand. I waited.

  After ten minutes or so a lean twist of hide in a frock coat and striped trousers strode down the boardwalk with a key in his hand. The face under a round-brimmed Spanish hat was leathern, cracked at the corners of the eyes and stretched taut across a very straight nose that came almost to a point. He wore a drooping black moustache and a gold star the size of a tea saucer attached by tiny gold chains to a nameplate on his vest. The nameplate was blank, but the words “City Marshal, Breen, M.T.” were engraved on the star in the center of a lot of scrollwork.

  I said, “You must be the new city marshal.”

  He stopped short, fingers dangling near the ivory butt of a Navy Colt on his right hip. I have that effect on people.

  “You have the advantage.” His voice was thin and tight, like everything else about him.

  I gave him my name and got out the simple star that said DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL, no chains or scrollwork. “It’s not as nice as yours.”

  “You’re the one wired Bram about Shedwell coming,” he said.

  “Bram?”

  “Abraham Arno.” He sounded like a schoolmaster prompting a slow pupil. “We just put him in a hole north of town.”

  “Did he really choke on a piece of steak?”

  “That’s what his widow says. I think she poisoned him, but that’s only the opinion of a temporary marshal.” He unlocked the door and went inside, leaving it open. I closed it behind me.

  There was clapboard on the inside, whitewashed and broken up only by the stovepipe, a gun rack, a single barred window looking out on the dusty street, and a sheaf of wanted dodg
ers tacked to the wall behind the desk, brown and curling. A partition across the back partially screened a row of unoccupied cells beyond. Over everything hung a heavy odor of boiled coffee and cigars.

  “You ride for Judge Blackthorne.” He pegged his hat next to the door, passed through a gate in an oak railing, and took a seat in a wooden swivel behind the desk. He looked younger with his abundance of black hair exposed, somewhere in his late twenties. “I hear when folks in Helena get bored they stick him in a pit with a grizzly just to see fur fly.”

  “That’s him. What about Shedwell?”

  He slipped an ivory comb from the inside breast pocket of his coat and glided it through his pompadour. I watched him wipe bay rum off the teeth with a red silk handkerchief before putting it away and calculated the depth of my dislike for him.

  “No sign of him yet,” he said. “I think someone was having fun with your boss.”

  “That’ll be the day. Are you as much law as they got around here?”

  He lost his good nature. His eyes were murky pools of no color you could put a name to. “You ride a fast mouth for one man.”

  “They give you deputies?”

  It took him a moment to answer. His eyes never moved. “Two full-time. And the geezer that watches the place when there are prisoners. Why?”

  “They all been looking for Shedwell?”

  “They’re deputies, aren’t they?”

  “Do they even know what he looks like? Do you?” When he didn’t answer, I pulled out the soggy reader I’d had plastered to my chest for fifty miles and peeled it open under his nose. It featured a fair likeness of the man I was after from his night-riding days, under a line offering a thousand dollars for his capture. The marshal studied it a moment, then leaned back, squeaking his chair.

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “He was pretty fresh when this was done,” I pressed. “He’s aged some since.”

  He shook his head. His expression was condescending. I said, “What do they call you?”

  “Yardlinger. Oren Yardlinger.”

  I blinked. “And you let them?”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Pale slashes showed on his cheeks like healed-over scars.

  I placed the paper on his blotter. “Tack it up. Have your men look at it and let me know if he shows. I’ll be around.”

  “Why should he?” Something of his normal color had returned. “I hear he’s selling his gun these days. There’s no business for him here.”

  “How many men did you bury last month?”

  “Six, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “How many of them died in bed?”

  “One.” He hesitated. “He held on for two weeks after a crazy half-breed split his skull with an oak chair over at the Glory.”

  I tapped the bulletin I’d given him. “When you’ve got something you’ll find me at the Freestone Inn. Room twelve.”

  I’d dropped my valise off at the hotel on my way into town. Returning, I got out my city clothes and a razor and went down to the bathhouse, where I spent a leisurely half hour scraping off the trail dust and the worst of my whiskers. Afterward I left my riding clothes to be laundered and mounted the stairs to my room, drowsiness spreading through me like the warmth from a shot of whiskey. But in the carpeted hallway outside I stopped.

  You start to develop a sixth sense after you’ve been on the frontier a while. Camping in the desert, you know before you pull your boots on that there’s a scorpion curled up in one of them. Riding along the trail, you feel a road agent waiting for you around the next bend. Those who didn’t learn to detect the unseen signs of danger didn’t last long enough to unpack their bags. That was how I was sure without opening the door that there was someone in my room.

  And since whoever it was hadn’t bothered to ask my leave, I could only assume that he felt it wouldn’t matter much longer.

  CHAPTER 2

  Once in Missoula I had waited outside a cabin for two and a half hours until the killer who was laying for me got impatient and tried to shoot his way out. I put three slugs in him sight unseen before he reached the door. I could have played it that way this time, except that I was too tired for stealth and too mad to give whoever it was the satisfaction. Instead I kicked the door open and dived in headfirst, sliding on my stomach with my Colt clasped in front of me in both hands. I interrupted a game of solitaire on the bed.

  The player, seated on the edge of the mattress, was thin in a sickly sort of way, with pinched shoulders and a sunken chest and hollows in his cheeks that were accentuated by the curve of his reddish side-whiskers. Startled, he dropped the deck and swept aside the skirt of his Prince Albert to get at a small pistol stuck in his waistband.

  “Call!” I shouted.

  He froze with his hand on the curved butt. I could hear his labored breathing. Slowly he raised his hands to shoulder level.

  There was another man standing next to the window, but his hands were empty and clear of his body. For what seemed a long time I lay motionless, the .44 cocked and commanding the middle ground between the two, before the thin man spoke. He had the kind of voice that made you want to clear your throat.

  “You always come into a room like that, or is this a special occasion?”

  “It varies with my mood.” I got up, keeping them both covered. “Do you always break into other people’s rooms just to play cards?”

  “No one broke anything,” he said. “The clerk let us in while you were bathing.”

  “Nice town. The merchants and the burglars work together. Who goes to jail, the marshal?”

  “The responsibility is mine.”

  I studied the man at the window. He was small, not much larger than a twelve-year-old boy, but with a large head, and looked so dapper in spats, striped trousers, and a black coat with a pinched waist that I was reminded of a poster I had seen of General Tom Thumb in full uniform standing in the palm of a man’s hand. His black hair was combed into a fussy lock on his forehead, which, together with his spadelike chin whiskers and moustache waxed into points, turned him into a junior-size Napoleon III. He had liquid brown eyes.

  “I persuaded the clerk to allow us to wait for you in your quarters.” His French accent was guttural. “It was unseemly for men of our reputation to be seen standing about a hotel lobby. We have tampered with none of your things.”

  I said, “Who are you? Just so I can introduce you to Marshal Yardlinger when we get to the jail.”

  The thin man chuckled dryly. I glared at him and he fell silent.

  “I am Michel d’Oléron, Marquis de Périgueux,” the little man replied, bowing his head slightly and exposing a bald spot like a monk’s tonsure. “You may call me Périgueux if you wish.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He turned his palm upward, indicating his partner. “The gentleman you found too slow with the firearm is Dick Mather, owner of the Six Bar Six, across which you doubtless rode on your way to Breen. We are both ranchers. As of last month, I control something over two million acres of grassland between Monsieur Mather’s property and the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming Territory.”

  “That’s a bite to chew for someone from Europe,” I said.

  He smiled complacently without showing teeth. “It is larger than Corsica and Sardinia combined.”

  “Thanks. Now that I’ve had my geography lesson, I’d appreciate it if you and Dick would pile all your excess iron on the floor at the foot of the bed.”

  “But of course. Monsieur?”

  Carefully, the emaciated one the Frenchman called Mather drew the derringer from his waistband, got up to place it on the floral carpet, and backed away. I looked at Périgueux.

  “I am unarmed, monsieur. Voilà.” He unbuttoned and swung open his coat. His vest was yellow silk, with an ornament of red and gold dangling from one pocket.

  “Nice fob,” I said.

  He fondled it. “It was presented to me by the late emperor. Unfortuna
tely, military medals have no place in civil life, and so it must serve the purpose of assisting me in learning the time of day. It is all I have left to remind me of a glorious era.”

  “Show me the watch.”

  He raised his eyebrows. There were traces of gray in them, like dust in snuff. I explained.

  “I cornered a rapist in Deer Lodge a couple of years ago who had a derringer attached to a fob like that one. I’m still carrying the ball.”

  With a continental shrug, he reached two fingers into the pocket and produced an ornate gold watch with a capital N engraved on the lid, encircled by oak leaves. I nodded. He replaced it.

  “You and Louis Napoleon must have been pretty tight.”

  “I was a marshal of France.”

  “I didn’t think the nobility got along with the Bonapartes.”

  “It is to them that I owe my title. It was bestowed upon me along with certain lands when I married into the family.”

  “Cozy.”

  “Pardon?”

  I shook my head and put up the Colt to retrieve Mather’s gun from the floor. Unloading it, I placed the cartridges on the writing desk next to the door and returned the piece to its owner. “Now, let’s all have a seat and discuss why I shouldn’t turn you over to the marshal.”

  “To begin with,” growled Mather, “the marshal takes his orders from us.”

  I scaled my hat onto the bed and leaned back against the desk. Périgueux had claimed the room’s only upholstered chair, while Mather had resumed his perch on the edge of the bed.

  “Isn’t that the city council’s responsibility?” I asked.

  “Indeed,” responded the Frenchman. “In addition to the Six Bar Six, Monsieur Mather maintains controlling interest in two local saloons, which qualifies him for his elected position on the council. I hold no property in Breen. To do so would be just a formality in any case, since I am now the largest rancher in Montana and my word alone carries certain weight.”

  Mather was growing impatient. Two feverish spots of red the size of half-dollars showed high on his cheeks. Together with his otherwise sallow complexion and wasted frame, they branded him a consumptive. “Oh, get on with it, Mike!” He nailed me with glistening eyes. “We understand you’re a United States marshal.”