The Stranglers Read online

  "It's a five-shot revolver made in England," I explained.

  "It's a forty-five-caliber double-action, which means that when the hammer's drawn back, like now, a kitten sneezing is all it takes to slap a hole through one or both of you wide enough to let through a buckboard and team. Whistle him off, Colonel."

  He considered me over the glass in his pudgy hand. His chest, quilted with fat, lifted and fell. "All right, Frank."

  Willard didn't move. Hookstratton said it again with a different inflection. The gunman lowered his hands to his thighs.

  The band was playing "Clementine," the local favorite. I said, "You're breathing my air."

  Hookstratton drained the glass and braced his hands on the sides of his chair. "Before we leave, I would admire to see this marvelous engine of British design."

  I laid the slim gun still cocked atop the table carefully. Hookstratton nodded and pushed himself to his feet, a vein on his forehead swelling with the effort. Willard sprang up and slammed his chair back under the table.

  "I would not have let this come to violence," the little fat man assured me. "I merely wished to observe your behavior under the circumstances. May I say that you behaved more than satisfactorily. Should you change your mind about my offer, we will be staying at the hotel through the end of the week. I would be honored if you would attend one of the Sunday performances as my guest."

  "Thanks for the beer," I said.

  He nodded again and turned toward the exit, swaying like a squat galleon in a high wind. Willard doglegged behind to keep an eye on me. The miners singing "Clementine" had finished with the standard verses and were getting bawdy. They'd missed the whole thing.

  Helena didn't fit me right for a place to live anymore.

  FIVE

  "Watch your back, Flynn," I said.

  I was sitting on one hip on the sill of my open window, buttoning on my cuffs in the gray dawn chill and watching Cocker Flynn leaning tight the pack straps on a big army mule with a rippled white bullet scar along its ribs. He had the two deputies from Great Falls with him and a tall bony young deputy marshal we called the Swede on account of his hacked-out features and pale hair and eyebrows, but who was actually of English stock. They had fresh horses built big to carry a lot of iron. At the sound of my voice, Flynn spun sideways to offer a smaller target and cocked a thumb back toward the scarred revolver butt above his holster. Then he saw me and unwound.

  "Watch your own," he replied.

  That was the extent of our farewell. The Swede wound the mule's halter around his saddle horn and the party mounted and clanked away down the street, pushing mile-long shadows ahead of them. Flynn and I had burned up the first hour of the previous nightfall discussing the Indian's act of treachery and what he was likely to be doing now and where he was likely to be doing it.

  We both knew I was being punished for trusting too much in Sugar Jim's drinking buddy. It was Blackthorne's policy to assign the deputy most recently familiar with the country to a manhunt there, and there was no other face you could put on my exclusion this time. Blackthorne tended to see things in dark and light. He wouldn't understand that you had to rely on the tools at hand in that place and in that time when men who knew the territory and who were willing to help out the law were so far apart you could kill a good horse riding from one to another. You took what you found and placed your faith in guns and God.

  The Belmont started serving breakfast at first light for the miners on their way to their claims. I took bacon and eggs there and then checked the sorrel out of the livery stable and rode off the meal along the river. When I got back to my room I found a message from the Judge directing me to report to Bill Gordon's office.

  Gordon was glad to see me. The marshal kept a neat little room lined with oak filing cabinets in the courthouse, and when I rapped on the open door he lowered a foot swathed in thick bandages from his rolltop desk to the floor and levered himself out of his chair with a stout cane. He was a middle-sized fifty with gray side-whiskers, gold-rimmed spectacles, and shoulders so stooped under the gray suits he wore he looked at first glance like a hunchback. His pockets were always full of papers and he never carried a gun and if you didn't see the plain star he had pinned to his vest you'd have taken him for a schoolteacher or a lawyer, which he was, both, long before someone in the White House thought he'd make a better lawman. He limped over to the door and snatched his derby off the peg.

  "That it for today?" I asked.

  "My foot says yes." The hat rested on his ears and on the tops of his spectacles. "I just came in to look at last night's mail and found him waiting for me to open up."

  He gestured toward the bald man with a great noose of curly black beard covering his chest seated in the only other chair. "As if he didn't have an office of his own, and twice as big as this one."

  "But only half as private. Hello, Murdock." The bald man unfolded his six feet four inches from the chair and reached an arm halfway across the room to take my hand in a firm grip.

  "Mr. Springer." I found myself looking up at the carved-idol face with its great hooked nose and deep smoldering eyes, and as always when confronted with Judge Blackthorne's prosecutor I wondered if he bothered to wear a cravat behind that Homeric beard. As always I decided that he did.

  "You hear who the Judge got to take my place?" Gordon demanded.

  I said I had heard. He thumped the floor with his cane. "I reckon next he'll be deputizing Frank and Jesse."

  "Don't blame the Judge," I said. "Blame President Hayes."

  "I'll blame who I damn well want to. It'll take an act of Congress to fire me."

  He stumped on out. Springer closed the door behind him, waved a hand toward the chair he had just vacated, claimed the marshal's swivel for himself, and spent some time arranging his legs as it was adjusted to Gordon's shorter ones. I took the other chair.

  "The Judge has set Jim Creel's trial for next week," he announced. "I thought we'd go over your testimony."

  "I've testified before. This is the first time you've called a rehearsal."

  "Times are changing. Gold and silver has brought a lot of civilization to the territory over the past several months. The town is filling up with lawyers and every blessed one of them has been to the jail to see Creel. The lawyer who gets him out of this hole is on his way to a very lucrative practice."

  "Small chance of that."

  He smoothed his beard over his chest with both hands, a thing I'd seen him do in court when the opposition scored a point. "You don't know these Eastern lawyers," he said. "They'll tell you black's white and bring in precedent and a string of expert witnesses to prove it. I've seen slime swinging from gallows out here that would have walked away free as air back East. Men with even stronger cases against them than we have against Creel."

  "If that happens here, he'll be lynched sure."

  "Maybe not. His killing that government surveyor won him a lot of friends in the territory. Oh, and speaking of lynching." He drew a long fold of stiff paper from his inside breast pocket and handed it to me.

  I unfolded it. It was a reader from Cheyenne directing all law enforcement agencies in Wyoming and Montana to watch for two Pinkerton agents reported missing during an investigation of the robbery of an Overland stage outside Rock Springs in December 1879. A detailed description of the missing detectives followed.

  "That came in on top of a stack of bulletins with last night's stage," Springer said. "The Judge wondered if those descriptions fit the men you found hanged."

  "They don't not fit them." I handed back the bulletin. "Magpies and bloat don't help with identification."

  "If it was them and the incident is connected with various other lynchings around the territory, we're dealing with a group of vigilantes with a grudge against the law."

  "That narrows it down to three quarters of the population of Montana," I said.

  He smoothed his beard. "Well, that'll be Jordan Mercy's first headache. What happened with the Indian?"

  We talked until almost noon. He told me to speak clearly. He told me to sit up straight. He told me not to say anything derogatory about the court or my fellow deputies, as that might prejudice the jury in Sugar Jim's favor. I was to wear a clean shirt and a fresh cravat and watch my temper.

  "I'm convicting a killer," I reminded him. "I'm not looking for a husband."

  "Clamp a lid on your famous humor as well. Believe me, the jury won't appreciate it."

  "Anything else?"

  He peered at my face for a long time. Then he relaxed creaking in the chair with a long sigh. "Make an effort not to look so mean."

  I got away from there feeling like a guitar string with too much turn to it and had lunch at the Belmont, washing down fried chicken and mashed potatoes with good wine. It didn't loosen my cramped muscles any. The saddle time and the tight airlessness in Bill Gordon's office were starting to tell. I walked around to loosen the joints and found myself standing in front of Chicago Joe's. I went inside.

  Yellow-haired Jackie came over while I was drinking whiskey at the bar. Her blue satin dress hugged her trim hips and high bossed breasts so snugly that sitting down must have been a major operation. She had cut back on the scent today, and her natural coloring was as bright as the rouge on her cheeks. At least, that's how it seemed to me.

  "I reckon you're wanting to see Joe and talk." There was a challenge behind her professional smile. Well, she'd been rejected twice the day before.

  I said, "Nope," and ordered her a drink.

  Later we had another.

  When I hit the street after supper the saloons were going flat-out, leaking yellow light and music and voices hoarse from calling for water in the sluices. Glass shattered somewhere, a silvery tinkle at this distance. Someone was enjoying himself this Saturday night. I felt no urge to join whoever it was. There was always a strained quality to the jubilance, a desperation to have a good time at the end of a full week of mule labor that would take on a nasty edge as the night wore down. I could see the city deputies being inconspicuous in the shadows under the porches. No matter how dark it got you could always catch light reflecting off their badges and the barrels of their sawed-offs.

  Colonel Hookstratton's rig was nowhere in sight. He and his two-man, one-buffalo show would be squaring things away in Toby Shingledecker's pasture for the next day's performances. I wondered if I should accept the invitation to drop in. Frank Willard's six-gun witchcraft held a weird fascination for me. You couldn't do what I did and not feel the tug to watch someone else shoot. You never knew when he might be shooting at you.

  "Marshal!"

  At the whispered greeting I drew back instinctively into the shadows and looked around. There was no one on the street within whispering distance. When it was repeated I stepped out carefully and looked up. Jim Creel was at the window of his cell on the second floor of the jail across the street. A ghost of light from the passage behind him outlined his head clearly with his hands gripping the bars. He must have been standing on his cot, because the windows on that level were seven feet above the floor.

  "Sugar Jim." My voice carried in the quiet of that narrow side street as if across water.

  "Seen you coming out of Chicago Joe's before," he said. "Bet you was with Bertha."

  "No, Bertha's too big for me."

  "Jackie, then."

  I said nothing.

  "Sure, Jackie," he went on. "She's the first thing I look for when I'm in town. What you figure's the odds against a prisoner and the one who took him's being with the same girl?"

  "Not so big. There's one woman to every hundred men out here."

  "They's a damn sight less in here."

  "Well, whose fault is it you're in there, Sugar Jim?"

  "Oh, I ain't saying it's anyone's but my own." He paused. "This here's the first time I been inside, Marshal. Never thought it could be so hard looking at the sun shining and me not able to get out in it. Nor the moon neither."

  "That's why it's called jail."

  "Yeah. Well, I reckon I'll get out in the sun one of these mornings. Or are they doing that at night now?"

  "No, they drop the trap at dawn usually."

  "You'll not be sorry to see that, I bet. After what I done to your friends."

  "They weren't my friends," I said. "You did what you thought it took to stay away from that morning drop. I don't know that I'd have done it another way in your boots. It's the Indian I want. He had a choice."

  "He's a bad one, that Indian. He figured I paid better and quicker than the law, and I would of if everything had went the way it was supposed to. But I'd of got shed of him first chance. He's like a bee in ajar. You never know when you pull the cork who he's going to sting."

  "Speaking of that," I said. "Why'd you kill the surveyor?"

  "I got drunk."

  "That won't sound so good in court."

  "It's the truth."

  I said, "No promises, but if you know where the Indian and Harvey Byrd are you might beat the rope. You're young enough to have plenty of suns and moons left after you put in your prison time. We're going to get them anyway."

  Piano music clanked and clittered through the long silence. Then he moved his head from side to side slowly, and in the bad light I saw him grin. "No," he said, "I don't reckon I'll do that."

  I resettled my hat. "I didn't think you would, Sugar Jim. I was just doing my job."

  "What it takes," he agreed. "Going to see the show tomorrow?"

  "I might."

  "That fellow Willard is unchained hell with a Colt. I could of used him out there."

  "You wouldn't have wanted him. He's as bad as the Indian, only in a different way."

  "Being bad ain't fun. Don't know why so many folks figure it is."

  "Being good's no walk in the flowers," I said.

  The grin came back. "How the hell would you know?"

  We said our good-nights. As I was walking away he started whistling that drover's ballad he'd made us crazy with most of the way back from where we'd captured him.

  SIX

  They rode sloppy, now abreast, now not, their saddlebags flopping and slapping clouds of dust off their horses' ribs, but with a ragged discipline, as of the remains of a company of cavalry on their way back from a fierce battle. They were three big men in weathered black hats with the brims curled down in front and white linen dusters over their clothes, the tails split for riding and fanned out in back to cover their saddles. At first glance they looked alike, with their blue chins and thick black moustaches drooping over the corners of their mouths, but then you saw the lean muscles in the face of the man in the middle and the broad, double-chinned doughiness of his neighbor to the right and the pouty look of the rider on the other side with his lower lip outthrust. They all had the same straight nose and great brown eyes, the latter ringed dark. Most of the faces that belonged to famous names out there were disappointing, no different from thousands of others in a place where severe weather and hard work and bouts with boredom shook out those men who didn't fit the type. The Mercys were something apart. Not outside the type, just more the type than the rest. Heads just naturally turned as they trotted down a boomtown street long accustomed to the tread of strange horses carrying nameless men. Their mounts were big roans, the man in the middle's a whiteface whose head looked like a naked skull until you looked again. All three were lathered and blowing.

  I was watching the riders from the porch of the courthouse, where I'd just come off looking for a second morning's briefing with prosecutor Springer, only to find that he was in church. The sun was in front of them and their eyes were in shadow under their hat brims except when they raised their heads to scan the roofs and upper windows in that fashion peculiar to desperadoes on their way to tap a bank and lawmen on their way anywhere. Their plain stars showed flat and dull on their shirts where their dusters hung open in front. The curved butts of their Smith & Wessons were large and obvious with the dusters' tails pushed back behind them, and over their blanket rolls reared the oiled stocks of matching Winchesters. They looked like men going somewhere to do something, that was the difference. Though I'd never seen them before I knew them right off.

  "Jordan! Jordan Mercy!" Colonel Hookstratton, coming out of the hotel next door picking his teeth with a sliver of gold, waved his hat. A perfectly round, pink bald spot the exact circumference of the crown glistened at the back of his head.

  The rider in the middle, he of the lean muscles and skull-faced roan, turned in his saddle, fingers curling at his holster. His companions duplicated the maneuver an instant later like reflections in a slow mirror. When he saw Hookstratton, the first man crinkled his eyes and sidled over the boardwalk.

  "Aaron, you old horse thief, have they not hung you yet?"

  His voice was middle-register with a slight Kansas ricochet. His lips were drawn thin behind his moustache, and unless you were looking at his eyes you wouldn't have known he was joking.

  "I had heard you were coming," Hookstratton announced. "These must be your notorious brothers."

  The other two, still on horseback, had just joined them. Jordan indicated first the wide, doughy man, then the younger one with the little-boy pout. "Joshua and Jericho. Fellows, this is the Colonel Hookstratton I have been shouting about these past two years. The one who made me as famous as Sam Grant."

  "An edifice is only as sound as its bricks." The Colonel expanded his great gut.

  The others nodded but didn't offer their hands. That was another way you spotted them, by the way they kept at least one free all the time.

  "You are still a drinking man?" asked Jordan.

  "Who am I to deny a major industry its just profit?"

  "I will take that as a yes answer." Jordan gathered his reins. "Let us attend to our mounts and then we will drink to old acquaintances."

  "All the saloons are closed today," Hookstratton pointed out. "All those we should care to patronize, in any case."