The Stranglers Page 2

  "I was up taking a leak when the fracas started," he told me, without looking away from the youth on the ground. "I run back, and this'n pointed a gun at me, but I knocked it out of his hand and he slugged me. I pushed him and he fell over something. I got the drop on him then."

  I covered him while the kid got my special set of manacles from my saddlebags and we locked the captive's hands behind his back and jerked him to his feet and prodded him into the middle of camp. There the kid hooked an ankle around one of Sugar Jim's and shoved him so that he fell on his face a rifle's length from Charley Rudabaugh. The kid picked up Rudabaugh's gun. I took the lantern and went looking for Dad Miller.

  I found him at his post, slumped against the base of a tree. His throat was cut from corner to corner. His revolver was still in its holster and his Winchester hadn't been fired.

  He'd finally found a job that his fists weren't up to. I checked on the horses. They were skittish but in good condition. One was missing, the Indian's piebald. I went back to camp.

  Sugar Jim wasn't talking, but Rudabaugh still was, and with the kid's help we worked it out. While the camp was asleep the Indian had sneaked away, jumped Dad from behind, and opened his throat before he could sing out. Then he walked his horse beyond earshot of the rest of us and mounted and rode out to fetch Sugar Jim and his partners, who were much closer than even Dad had believed. I'd known the Indian was quiet but I hadn't thought he was quiet enough to beat Rudabaugh's hearing, which might explain why I slept a little more soundly than usual that night. Anyway, they came back and jumped us. Upon awakening, Rudabaugh lost a split second looking for the Indian in his bedroll, so that he fired at the same time as his assailant instead of ahead of him, killing him but getting gutshot in the process. Meanwhile I was shooting it out with the others, who had then retreated from the unexpected resistance. Walking around later with the lantern, the kid and I found some random blood spots on the grass leading away. I had at least nicked one of them. I hoped it was the Indian.

  I got the whiskey flask from my saddlebags, uncorked it, and handed it to Rudabaugh, whom we had made as comfortable as possible by placing his saddle behind his head and covering him with our blankets.

  The kid said, "You're not supposed to give them nothing when they're gutshot."

  Rudabaugh looked at him pityingly, then tipped up the flask. Some of the red-tinted liquid spilled over his beard. He had stopped talking by now and the container required both hands to hold it up. His complexion in the lantern light was taking on that beautiful white translucence, streaked scarlet at the cheeks, that consumptives get in their last hours. He had been bleeding into his belly for some time and the external wound itself had stopped leaking. At intervals he would hawk and spit, peppering the ground with crimson.

  The scant information we had gotten from the settlers in Creel country said the young killer was traveling with a cousin close to his own age named Harvey Byrd and an older man who went by Melrose. We figured Melrose was the dead man at Rudabaugh's feet. Sugar Jim didn't open his mouth to confirm or deny it.

  The kid and I divided the rest of the night, spelling each other to watch Sugar Jim and look to Rudabaugh while one slept. Just before first light the kid woke me, and it was there in his silence.

  "Rudabaugh?" I said.

  "One minute I was talking to him, and the next I was talking to myself."

  There was a quiet about him dead that went deeper than the kind he had kept when he was breathing. We manacled our prisoner's arms around the trunk of a sixty-foot pine and scouted up rocks from the river to cover Rudabaugh and Dad Miller and Melrose. We found Sugar Jim's revolver in a clump of grass and kept that for evidence and sank Dad's weapons and Rudabaugh's Schofield in the river. When you're traveling you try not to load yourself down with unnecessary iron. Dawn was sending steel shafts into the black sky when the kid finished reading from Solomon again and we got horsed, chewing salt pork. It was getting to be a good week for the wolves and magpies.

  "Which way?" asked the kid.

  "Helena. We got what we came for."

  "What about the Indian and Byrd?"

  "If they're smart they're still moving. If not we'll reel them in in a few weeks. The Judge doesn't take to having his deputies killed."

  "You act like you don't care one way or the other," he said.

  "You try not to make a lot of friends in this business."

  Sugar Jim rode Rudabaugh's roan with his wrists chained over the saddle horn. Whatever he had ridden in on had either galloped off when the shooting started or fled with his partners. We had discarded what supplies we didn't need now that we were only three, and split up what was left between our packhorse and Dad's mount for speed. At first our captive was sullen and silent, but as the sun climbed and drew steam from the thawing grass he started humming an old drover's tune I recognized. He kept it up on and off throughout the day until the kid shouted at him to be quiet. That night we kindled our first fire in days. Sugar Jim tried to strike up a conversation over coffee, but when it didn't work he sat back with his tin cup and fell to humming again between sips. He had an open face and lively eyes and no more conscience than a wild dog. I knew his type well enough to chain him to whatever was handy and take turns watching him through the long nights.

  In Great Falls I wired Judge Blackthorne a brief report, got an even briefer confirmation in that shorthand he had invented to save the government money, and borrowed a pair of sheriff's deputies to see us the rest of the way to the territorial capital. One was a sour old professional Dad's age who had fought Comanches as a Texas Ranger. The other was no older than the kid and treated the prisoner like foreign royalty because he'd read a dime novel about Sugar Jim written by a New York journalist who got all his research out of the St. Louis papers. I looked forward to getting shed of both.

  Near the kid's father's ranch I shook his hand and told him to look me up if he ever felt like wearing a star.

  "Not me," he said. "Believe I'll stick to cattle from here on.

  He was smarter than I'd thought.

  Helena didn't fit me right for a place to live anymore, which is one reason I was hardly ever there. Placer gold deposits east of the Missouri and lead and silver digs to the southwest had turned it in a few years from the rough-mannered mining town I had discovered on my first visit to the richest city per capita in the country, full of millionaires and saloons with shining cuspidors and big funny houses with more peaks and turrets than all the castles on the Rhine. Churches were going up and there was talk of a school, and pretty soon the citizens would be dressing their law in uniforms and round caps with stiff shiny black visors and there wouldn't be any welcome left for unpolished types like me who carried their badges in their pockets. All we did was remind them what things were like before we made the territory safe for the folks that didn't want us.

  For the time being, though, the edges were still sharp enough for them to want us between.

  Shots rang off the stone and brick buildings on Main Street just as we hit the hardpack. The horses shied, snorting, the young deputy's bay arching its back and coming down on stiff legs, almost unseating its rider, then trying again. He choked up on the reins and turned the animal in on itself. It wheeled clear around, shook its mane, and stopped. He was a better man with a horse than I would have given him credit for. By that time we all had our guns out, but all the shooting was going on at the far end of the street, and not at us.

  A tall square box of a wagon was stopped there crosswise, painted a peeling yellow with the legend col. a

  HOOKSTRATTON'S FRONTIER EXTRAVAGANZA & MEDICINAL

  demonstration skirling in foot-high gilt letters across the side and the more sober message aaron hookstratton,

  LT. COL. RET'D., LATE ARMY OF THE REP. OF MEXICO neatly

  blocked underneath. A short fat man with white side-whiskers and tobacco-stained handlebars that tickled his ears stood on a platform in back, wearing dusty striped pants, a black hat like Mormons wear wit
h a high rounded crown and a flat brim, and a buckskin jacket of a decidedly eastern cut for all the twelve-inch fringe hanging from the sleeves and down the front. Just behind him and towering over him loomed an Indian in bleached eagle feathers and a red blanket that needed washing. The wagon was hitched to a gray and a black, and since that seemed hardly enough to haul that crew plus the wagon, I assumed that at least two of the horses tethered to the rail nearby belonged to the outfit. I was pretty sure the moth-eaten buffalo tied there did. It was going white and slatsided, but the pale old horn scars along its ribs told of an interesting past.

  The man doing the shooting was about my height, not tall but not short either, very thin, clean-shaven, and wore black from his kerchief to his gleaming knee-high boots. His hat, buff-colored, Texas-wide, had never held a horse's fill of water. He carried twin Colt Peacemakers with matched black gutta-percha grips. Every time the little fat man in the buckskin jacket threw a tin can high into the air from the bushel basket full of them he had on the platform, the man in black would draw one of the Colts, plug it five times while it was airborne, holster the Colt, pull its mate without missing a beat, and plug the can five times more where it landed, making it dance down the street, bang-clunk, bang-clunk, bang-clunk. Then he would reload both guns and go again. Always five cartridges, never six. Either he kept an empty under the hammer or he had something against an unloaded gun.

  He was as fast as any man I'd ever seen.

  "There you have it, friends and neighbors," announced the little fat man finally in a deep voice that carried over the echo of the last shot. "A demonstration in the fine art of pistoleering by its greatest living practitioner, Frank Willard, the Scourge of the Border, who single-handedly wiped out the infamous Turner gang at the Dodge station in eighteen and seventy-nine. Just one of the many stirring adventures that await your eyes and ears in Toby Shingle-decker's pasture this Sunday for the minuscule sum of fifty cents, children eight and under free. Shows at one, three, and five. See also Chief Knife-in-the-Belly of the murderous Blackfeet demonstrate the ages-old running of the buffalo and reenact the famous knife duel between Wild Bill Hickok and the Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle at Custer's battle of the Washita. Bring the entire family and treat them to a vanishing episode in American history."

  Having unraveled all this in one breath, he filled his lungs again and started a pitch for something called Doctor Ernest's Nectar for the Treatment and Elimination of Ague, Catarrh, Toothaches, Bunions, la Grippe, Typhoid, and Halitosis. That same minuscule fifty cents, he promised, would secure a full pint of this miraculous elixir that would also restore old saddle leather to its original suppleness if you boiled the saddle in six parts water to one part Doctor Ernest's Nectar. We turned down a side street and could still hear the climb and drop of his voice when we reached the jail. The East had come to Helena, and it cost fifty cents a head.

  THREE

  Among the deputy marshals who rode for Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne there were three main evils, two of which had to do with the low pay and the standing order that deputies who brought their quarries in dead had to stand their burial. The third was the Judge's walk.

  Four times daily, he strode the mile between his house outside town and the courthouse near the jail at a brisk pace that had been known to ruin some of the older deputies for the rest of the day after accompanying him. In the morning he made the journey to work, hands in his pockets and his large head sunk between his shoulders, nodding jerkily at citizens who greeted him, then reversed it at noon recess when he went home for lunch, made it again at the hour break, and walked home when the day's docket was empty, which most often was well after dark. Because all this walking carved considerable time out of his schedule, he conducted most of his business on the trot, with counsels and court employees wheezing to keep pace and hold up their end of the conference at the same time. Several lawyers and deputies had suggested he find a place closer to town—one at least had offered to build one—but the Judge always declined, maintaining that the walk was the only exercise he got. So far it had cost him three bailiffs, two to resignations and the other to a fatal heart attack.

  The Judge was on the bench when I sent in a message informing him that I was back and that Sugar Jim Creel was locked up in Second Floor Felony. He sent a reply asking me to meet him in the courtroom at noon. Knowing what that meant, I made a quick trip to the room I kept over a harness shop across from the Belmont Saloon, took off my high-heeled riding boots, and tugged on a pair of farmer's brogans. I had taken my share of ragging from some of the other deputies when I'd ordered them from Montgomery Ward's catalogue, but that had stopped about the second time they came hobbling back from one of the Judge's walks.

  I got to the side door of the courtroom just as it banged open and two deputies lurched out hanging on to a red-bearded, wild-eyed mountain man in a filthy bearskin and chains. He was struggling, growling in his throat like a cougar, and it was all they could do to keep a grip on his arms.

  "How are things, Flynn?" I asked the older of the pair, a short, wide man with a band of black brow and handlebars to match.

  "About the same," he grunted. "You?"

  "I found Sugar Jim."

  "So I hear. They're whispering it in court already. Hear too you lost Dad and Rudabaugh."

  I admitted I had.

  "Reckon now we'll all pull a piece of their freight till the Judge finds two other dumb guys," he said. "Well, thank you all to hell, Murdock."

  I got out of the way and the deputies scuffled down the varnished hallway toward the exit, their prisoner trying to crush them against first this wall, then that.

  Cocker Flynn was the finest man who ever pinned on a star.

  Judge Blackthorne emerged from the courtroom with a curt nod for me and continued across the hall to his chambers without breaking stride. The hem of his robes zinged against the floor. He was too short for them, though from a distance he didn't look it, he was that lean and wiry. There was still no gray in his goatee but there was getting to be plenty of it in his hair. Well, there was getting to be plenty of it in mine. At thirty-seven, when I had my hat off and the sun hit me right, I looked almost as gray as Dad. So I'd been told. Now that he was dead it was a toss-up between me and Cocker Flynn which one of us would inherit the old man's nickname.

  I loitered in the Judge's doorway while he climbed out of his robes and into a black frock coat with beaver facing on the lapels. His clothes were his only extravagance. He ordered them from his tailor in Chicago and traveled there once every two years for a new fitting. All on his own money. He had no expense voucher and had refused Washington City's last two offers to raise his salary. It made Mrs. Blackthorne furious, but he had stopped listening to her years before I knew him.

  He said nothing until we were outside, our heels knocking the boardwalk. He was wearing his black slouch hat and the porcelain teeth he put in only when he was working. They clanked on his f's and s's. "Let's have it."

  I gave him it. The story didn't take as long to tell as I'd expected. He listened without interrupting, then:

  "It could have been avoided."

  "I'm sure it could have," I agreed. "Looking back on it, I can count three ways I should have gone. But I didn't have it to look back on at the time."

  "You'll pay the court clerk two dollars for the man Mel-

  rose's burial. The government will eat the loss of Ruda-baugh and Miller. You were all taking the same chances."

  "We buried Melrose out there. Besides, it was Ruda-baugh who killed him."

  "But we can't fine Rudabaugh, can we?" He frowned a greeting at one of the town millionaires out strolling with a girl from Chicago Joe's. "The two dollars is punitive, as you well know. I have to make an example of you for the other deputies who otherwise will look at this and question why they're busting their rumps to bring in live prisoners when they can shoot them and be done with it."

  "Sometimes it's worth the two dollars."

  "To you, perhaps.
Here it's four trips to Colonel Aaron Hookstratton's Frontier Extravaganza and Medicinal Demonstration."

  "Who is he, anyway?"

  "Ask him. He'll get around to introducing himself soon enough. Especially to you."

  God knew what he meant by that. We had been together some time and I hadn't yet got the straight of him.

  The town proper was behind us now. We were walking along the rutted road to the Judge's house with the broad brown soup of the Missouri on our left and beyond it the peaks of the Big Belt Mountains like dog's teeth gnawing a blue steel sky. White water threaded the middle of the river from the spring runoff. Some of the lower miners' settlements downstream would be flooding out about now, one of several reasons why I had never felt the urge to pan for gold.

  The Judge had his hands in his pockets as always when he walked. Some thought he did this to avoid shaking hands with the people he met, but his marshal and deputies knew he carried a cocked .32 Remington in his right pocket. He'd been shot at once and scorned bodyguards. But he was a better jurist than a sharpshooter, and I always floated a step behind him when he was packing the little widow-maker.

  "You've seen to the needs of those two deputies you recruited?" he asked.

  "I put them up in the hotel. They're going back tomorrow. I told them you'll be sending them mileage and a courtesy fee in a week or so."

  "They any good?"

  "They're all right as guards," I said. "I wouldn't count on them for much else. The young one's living in a West that doesn't hold up outside New York and the old one's got a mean streak."

  "You don't?"

  "Mine's constructive. If we're talking about who I want with me when I go after the Indian and Harvey Byrd, I'll take Cocker Flynn and any other two federal men you can spare."

  "You aren't going after the Indian. You're staying here to testify against Creel at his trial. I'm putting Flynn in charge of the manhunt."