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  THE STRANGLERS

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with

  the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Previously published by Ballantine Books

  Jove edition / September 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1984 by Loren D. Estleman.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part,

  by mimeograph or other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputoam.com

  ISBN: 0-515-12570-9

  A JOVE BOOK®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE and the "J" design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  To Frank Ames

  THE STRANGLERS

  ONE

  You hear some grotesque things about what happens to a man when he's hanged; how his face turns black and his neck stretches to three feet and he soils himself, and it's all true, except you never hear about the smell.

  The Indian detected it almost as early as the horses did and turned in that direction in that way they have, as if his piebald were just four extra limbs and did what he did the instant he decided to do it. We had been following the banks of a tributary of the Missouri that was dry so many months out of the year no one had bothered to give it a name, and now he swung west up a grassy slope to an aspen cluster on the crest. I signaled the others to follow and took the rear. I didn't trust the Indian; if there was something waiting up top I wanted to know about it in time to throw some lead, if it was the last lead I threw.

  I was riding a sorrel gelding that year, bought at auction from the estate of a rancher who'd bred mounts for the cavalry at Fort Abraham Lincoln, and it caught wind of something ten yards up it didn't take to and tried to rear, but I drew my Deane-Adams and laid the butt along the bone behind its right ear and after that it behaved. Two more yards and I almost reared myself. You catch winds like that on the wrong side of an outhouse on hot days when there's been slaughtering in the vicinity. But there were no ranches or homesteads for fifty miles, and anyway I knew the stench. I went up there.

  They hadn't bothered to do any climbing, just slung two fairly new ropes over a limb twelve feet up and tied one end around the trunk and the other around their customers' throats and walked their horses out from under them, because their necks weren't broken. The pair hung as motionless as a tintype, their hands tied behind their backs and the beginnings of bloat straining their belts and the tops of their boots. While the five of us were watching, a big slick blue magpie fluttered down from a high branch and perched upside down on the head of one of them and deftly plucked out his remaining eye. The kid we were using as guide made a strangling sound in his throat and fired his Colt twice at the bird, hitting it the second time in a cloud of feathers as it took flight. Then he dismounted to be sick behind the tree.

  The Indian spat a glittering brown stream of tobacco and said, "Hell, I'd heave too, I couldn't shoot no better'n that."

  Dad Miller told him to shut up.

  The Indian threw him one of his flat black looks, but in the end obeyed. Miller was half a foot shorter and at fifty-two had almost thirty years on him, but the old man's braided brown body was hard and his large broken-knuckled fists were fast and everyone who knew him knew it. He had been deputy U.S. marshal for nine years and had twice turned down the offer of a presidential appointment to marshal because it meant desk duty. Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne, who appointed the deputies in Montana Territory, was fond of saying that a Miller roundhouse right and a battered but breathing prisoner in the dock was worth ten Page Murdock corpses with bullets in their backs. I'm Murdock: But good boxers make poor gun handlers, and since the country we deputies rode in those days was short on referees and long on ammunition I was running this particular show.

  "Cut them down and let's see what's in their pockets," I said to the Indian.

  He kneed his horse forward lazily, hiding his eagerness, and started sawing away with the short, wide blade he carried in a sheath behind his neck. His right name was Virgil Blue Water, but I had never heard anyone call him by it. He dressed like a white man, his taste running to gaudy hand-tooled boots and hats with low crowns and curled brims, but his hawk nose and narrow-lidded eyes without lashes in a round face the color of old blood said what counted. He could track a flame by its heat and a man by his shadow, and if I had half what he had and didn't need him, he'd have been on the other end of a rope like the one he was cutting years ago.

  The first rope parted with a dull twang and the body thudded to the ground, followed a moment later by the other. The Indian swung out of his saddle and got to work. A few fat flies rode the stinking air, but it was too early in the season for the first hatch. The Indian ignored them crawling on his face as he probed the dead men's pockets, whistling inaccurately through his teeth.

  The kid appeared from behind the tree. He rocked a little on his two-inch bootheels and his face had a bluish tinge, but I could see he was going to stick. He was maybe twenty, long and loose, with coppery down on his upper lip and his gun in an army holster turned so that the butt snugged up against his right kidney. We'd borrowed him from his father, a rancher near Painted Rock who said the boy would just be in the way during roundup anyway because he spent most of his time fishing and hunting the north country when he should have been learning the cattle business.

  The fifth man in our crew was the killer.

  You need him in every posse, the man whose brain goes dead at the moment of decision and lets his reflexes think for him. I've held that position once or twice, but never fulfilled its requirements to Charley Rudabaugh's degree. Tall, brown-eyed and soft-looking, he wore his auburn hair over his collar mountain-fashion and a short dark beard with gray in it, but he wasn't thirty. He carried a Schofield high on his right hip and, I knew, a Forehand & Wadsworth pocket gun concealed somewhere else. He wasn't fast with either of them, but I'd seen him face faster men and he was still here and they weren't. The difference was that when they went for their holsters they were thinking about the people watching and what they might tell the law and would their gun misfire, and he wasn't thinking about anything but killing them. I don't know what he thought about the rest of the time. Sitting his big roan there in the shade of that tree, watching the Indian searching the two hanged men, he looked bored and stupid. It was a look a lot of men had taken with them to their rewards.

  The Indian rose. I asked him what he got.

  "Nothing with a name on it. Just this here." He held out a soggy tobacco pouch and a handful of stained cigarette papers.

  "Where's the poke you took off one of them?"

  Something moved under the skin of his face. He was still gripping the knife he'd used to cut the ropes and slash open the dead men's stubborn pockets. But he saw my hand resting on my thigh near the Deane-Adams and reached two fingers inside his breast pocket and drew out a soft leather pouch larger than the one holding tobacco. I took it and opened it. Eleven silver dollars clanked around inside. "The Judge'll hold it for the survivors," I said, stuffing it in a saddlebag. "Supposing none of 'em shows?"

  "Then they're yours. If you want to bother to put in a claim for eleven dollars."

  "I cut up a man once for five dollars he owed me."

  "Did he know he owed it?"

&nbs
p; We watched each other. Dad Miller said, "Anybody know them two? Kid?"

  The kid shook his head quickly. He hadn't glanced at the dead men since shooting the magpie. I said, "Look at them."

  His eyes went to me, hurt, then, slowly, to the corpses lying face up on the ground. His throat muscles worked. He looked away. "No. They're strangers."

  Dad said, "They ain't your ordinary drifters. Them custom boots come dear this far north. Wonder they still have them. I'd be tempted myself if their feet wasn't so damn big."

  They weren't that big, but Dad was a one-time cowboy like me and proud of his size sixes.

  "Nor railroad men neither," put in the Indian. "They got riding calluses."

  Charley Rudabaugh said nothing. I gathered my reins.

  "We'll float a reader when we get back to Helena. Mount up. We've got two hours' tracking light."

  "Ain't we going to bury them?" asked the kid.

  "You helped load the packs this morning," I said. "You see anything that looked like a shovel?"

  "We could scratch a hole with our knives."

  "Your knife, maybe." The Indian was putting his away. I said, "Sugar Jim's got two days on us. There'll be lots more to bury if we don't catch up soon."

  "Well, can't we at least say some words over them?"

  "You know any?"

  "Pa makes me tote this." He produced a pocket Bible with a thumb-smeared pebbled black cover. I shrugged. He approached the bodies and leafed through the tissue pages. We took off our hats, all except the Indian, who watched with a leg hitched over his saddle horn, the tobacco bulge working in his cheek. The kid's voice was drawn thin in the open air:

  "The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: but the expectation of the wicked shall perish... .'

  "The righteousness of the upright shall deliver them: but transgressors shall be taken in their own naughtiness. ...'

  "'Righteousness keepeth him that is upright in the way: but wickedness overthroweth the sinner....'

  "The light of the righteous rejoiceth: but the lamp of the wicked shall be put out.' "

  He closed the book and turned to straddle his black. I put my hat back on, reflecting. Good Christians always seem to wind up quoting from the Old Testament, for some reason.

  Sugar Jim Creel had shot and killed a government surveyor near Great Falls and fled east into the tablelands, where the one-man war of robbery and bloodletting he had waged against the government since he was sixteen had the support of cattlemen and homesteaders fed up alternately with the snubbing of and interference in their interests in Washington City. We had been the best part of a week prying information out of those close-mouthed old Indian fighters and hardscrabble farmers, but the consensus was that Creel and his partners were now too hot to risk harboring and were on their way to sanctuary in Canada. He was described as a fine-boned blond of eighteen with silver on his tongue and all the charm of a West Point lieutenant, hence his nickname. He had killed nine men that we knew of.

  It was early spring, that time when the breakup in the uneven blue chalk line of the Rockies to the west was swelling even that nothing waterway we were following to a yammering torrent with gray ice shards and shattered beaver dams bobbing in the rush. The air had a snap to it, the vapor of our spent breath at sundown was as thick as milk, and in the morning we had to use our gun butts to knock loose the ice masks that formed on the horses' faces as they slept. But from midmorning to late afternoon, breathing the heady smell of fresh new grass on the medium-cool wind from the southwest was like drinking strong wine.

  The sky was going maroon when the Indian dismounted to study last year's snow-flattened grass with the short green shoots showing beneath. We had come upon an old camp shortly after dawn and since then had been following the trail of four unshod horses across the rolling countryside. One set of tracks would belong to a pack animal. The Indian circled on foot for thirty yards, eyes down, then caught my attention and pointed his chin east.

  "Canada's north," I reminded him.

  The kid said, "They got to cross the river to get there, and this time of year the only safe ford's in that direction."

  "How do you know those tracks don't belong to Indian ponies?" I asked the Indian. "There's still some Shosbone up here, and a couple of dozen Nez Perce."

  "They don't ride abreast. They favor hiding how many they got with them by going single file. That was a white man's camp this morning, and anyway Sugar Jim leans to barefoot mounts to throw off trackers. Most trackers, anyhow."

  "What makes you such an expert on how he thinks?"

  "Him and me pulled a cork or two."

  I said, "You didn't tell me that going in."

  "You didn't ask."

  "What kind of start you figure they got on us now?" asked Dad.

  The Indian spat. "Two days."

  Dad said, "I'm thinking these here tracks ain't more'n a day old."

  "Topsoil here holds a mark longer than most." The Indian stepped into leather. They'd had this same argument about the abandoned camp.

  We cold-camped on a ridge with a thirty-degree runoff and a stand of spruce at our backs, rubbing down the horses with handfuls of grass and pulling at squares of stiff salt pork with our teeth. Dad Miller drew first watch. I left the others unrolling their blankets and walked the first few yards with him through the mottled darkness, frosted grass crunching under our boots.

  "Keep alive," I told him.

  He nodded once, feathery vapor fluttering at his nostrils. "The Indian?"

  "You know that feeling you get when you've wounded a bear and gone after him into the bushes and you're not sure any more who's hunting who?"

  "Yeah," he said, and walked the rest of the way to his post carrying his Winchester.

  Back in camp I scraped together a bed of dead grass near Charley Rudabaugh and spread my blanket on top of it. Rudabaugh was sitting cross-legged on his blanket, cleaning his Schofield by moonlight with a willow twig and an oily rag. The other two members of the posse were already wrapped in wool and motionless on the other side of him.

  "Anything happens," I said low, "kill the Indian."

  He continued wiping and cleaning and gave no sign of having heard. But his ears were as sharp as his reflexes. I rolled in and dropped asleep the way you do after fourteen hours pounding a saddle. I hadn't thought about the lynching since we'd left the aspens.

  TWO

  They hit us half an hour shy of midnight. I don't know what I heard that brought me awake, or if I heard anything at all. I rolled out as if I'd been burned, toward the open away from Rudabaugh by instinct, just as the guns opened up, their bullets chewing my blanket where I'd been and throwing dirt pattering against my back. My Deane-Adams was out and I fired twice at the fading phosphorescence of a powder flare. Someone made a coughing grunt, but by then there were more shattering reports all around me and I couldn't place it. The moon silhouetted a man pointing a gun at me and I shot at him. He dropped away, but I couldn't tell if I'd hit him or he was just getting out of the firing line. There was another shot close by, and something that might have been the beat of hoofs going away, and then there was nothing.

  In the straining silence I imagined I could hear powder smoke skidding along the ground. Then a screech owl somewhere cut loose with one of those shuddering shrieks that go straight up your spine. Somehow they always know when it's over. I got my legs under me in a tight crouch, gripping the five-shot.

  "Don't shoot!"

  At first I thought whoever it was was talking to me. I swiveled toward the voice, tightening on the trigger.

  "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't."

  The second voice—breathless, quaking—I recognized. I spoke the kid's name.

  There was a pause, then: "That you, Mr. Murdock?"

  I said it was. "What you got?"

  "Can't see good enough to tell. Just good enough to blow his brains out if he so much as twitches."

  "I ain't twitching," said the owner of the first voice. br />
  I went for the lantern and stumbled over something big on the ground. The something groaned.

  "Rudabaugh?" I said.

  "Yeah." His normally soft tenor had a guttural rasp.

  "Hurt bad?"

  "Ain't never been hurt good."

  "Hang on." I found the lantern finally, struck a match, and as the flame took hold of the wick, butter-colored light found the killer stretched out on his back to the left of his tangled blanket with his hands clasped over his abdomen. I saw the dark stain between his fingers. His Schofield was on the ground nearby and there was a large unmoving colorless lump at his feet. When I raised the lantern a dead man lay in its light. He was about twenty-five, with a lank moustache and a reddish stubble and blood glittering on his shirt. I didn't know him from Eddie Foy.

  I knelt and parted Rudabaugh's hands gently to get a look at the wound and then took off my kerchief and stuffed it inside to slow the flow. He caught his breath. "Sorry," I said.

  "Don't reckon I'll be feeling it much longer anyways."

  I didn't say anything to that. You don't argue with a right man.

  He grinned then, the white line of his teeth showing crooked in his dark beard. "So this here's what I been handing out all these years," he said. "I'll be damned."

  "More than likely." I told him to hang on again and picked up the lantern and went over to where the kid was standing with his Colt in his hand over a boy on his back on the ground with his hands resting high on his breast. Hatless, he had a thick shock of straw-colored hair and a delicate-looking face with a trace of baby fat and golden down like spun sugar on his cheeks. He didn't appear to be hurt. His eyes were pale under the lantern, but if the reader I was carrying in a pocket was reliable they were blue by daylight. The worn holster he had strapped on his left hip was empty.

  "Evening, Sugar Jim," I said.

  He made no answer. His eyes flicked my way momentarily, but for the most part they remained on the kid with the gun. The kid was bareheaded too, and his nose was bleeding into his puppy moustache.