According to Hoyle (4 page)

Wash brushed by him and headed back out into the front office. Flynn turned and followed him.

Wash just shook his head. “Even outlaws got their stories, Eli,” he said, his voice gruff.

“And they can tell ’em to the Devil when they see him,” Flynn argued stubbornly.

Wash sighed as he sat himself in front of the stove and propped his booted feet on the bench in front of him. It was an argument they’d had plenty of times, and one they’d have again. “Go get yourself a bath, Marshal Flynn,” he suggested with a resigned smile, obviously recognizing the argument as just as hopeless as it had been the last time. “I’ve ridden horses that smelled better’n you.”

Nebraska Badlands

A
COLD
wind whipped through the cottonwoods along the Rosebud River. Snow flurries rode the gusts, falling gently amidst the soldiers from nearby Fort Robinson who labored in the cold. Their breaths were visible in the frosty air even from the height of the ridges that rose above the river. The soldiers were being pushed hard, picking through the rocks that lined the river and piling them carefully into large crates. Some of the rocks contained what appeared to be skeletons within them; outlines of animals that no one had ever seen, trapped inside rocks with no explanation for how they’d gotten there. The soldiers tossed some of these rocks carelessly into stenciled crates along with the rest.

Another band of soldiers worked atop one of the high hills above the river, searching the ground for something long buried and digging random holes to find and recover it.

Bartholomew Stringer knelt amidst the scrub ponderosa pine atop the edge of a low butte, his dark eyes narrowed under the low brim of his hat. His second-in-command hunched beside him, the man’s narrow shoulders bent against the brisk wind that whipped down from the Black Hills to the north, into and across the badlands.

“You sure ’bout all this, Cap?” Frank Alvarado muttered to him as they watched. The man was thin and twitchy. His stringy blond hair hung lank and dirty around his narrow face, and his deep-set eyes were a pale blue that made him seem weak and sickly. He was anything but. Stringer had found him to be hard and tough, his weedy appearance working to his advantage more often than not.

Stringer glanced at him. He wasn’t used to having his orders questioned. But this was not a normal excursion, so he was giving his band of roughly half a dozen men some leeway. They had traveled all the way from Texas, and most of them had never been somewhere this damn cold. Back home they were known as the Border Scouts, a name retained from ties to the now defunct Confederate army because of the fear it instilled in those who heard it. Here, though, they were nothing but another gang of men with guns. It was a lot to ask of them to give up that esteem and comfort without telling them why they were here.

Stringer’s patience with their doubts was reaching an end, though.

“You know about Fort Robinson and the Indians, don’t you Frank?” Stringer asked in a whisper. He was a large man, taller than most and wide along the shoulders. His deep voice was often enough to keep order amidst the ruffians who called him Cap, but his size and his dark eyes helped to remind them just how cruel he could be when they got unruly.

Alvarado nodded jerkily as he continued to watch the soldiers below.

Three years ago, the Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife had been captured near Fort Robinson and imprisoned there. He’d tried to escape with his band of Indians and been massacred, effectively ending the Indian Wars in the Nebraska Territory. Stringer hadn’t known a lot about the Cheyenne or the Lakota Sioux at the time, and like most in the country, he hadn’t cared when he’d heard news about the mass death.

But then he’d met John C. Baird in Denver a week ago, and Baird had told him quite a tale.

Dull Knife, who’d been called an admirable outlaw, had hidden valuables amidst the clothing and ornamentation of his people as they’d evaded the Federal troops through the Nebraska badlands. Even their guns had been dismantled and hidden amidst blankets and parts of jewelry. The Cheyenne had been poor, though, starving and desperate by the time they’d reached the badlands. Most of the ceremonial trinkets and ancient baubles considered sacred by the elders weren’t of any interest to the soldiers.

Dull Knife, the ill-fated leader of the Cheyenne trying to return to their ancient homeland, had been among the first to be buried, put in the ground atop the very ridge the soldiers now searched, his grave lost to the shifting winds of the badlands.

Stringer related all this to Alvarado, who sat listening obediently just as he always did.

“What’s that got to do with us?” he finally asked hesitantly.

“Well, Frank,” Stringer murmured with a small, cruel smile. “They say after he was buried, the Rosebud River started running with gold.”

“Gold?” Alvarado repeated with a dubious lift to his eyebrow.

“Gold,” Stringer said with a nod.

Alvarado stared at him for a moment, then turned his pale eyes back to the soldiers laboring below them. “I don’t understand.”

“Me neither,” Stringer told him softly. “All I know is that government man wants whatever these boys dig up, and he wants it bad. Our job is to get it for him.”

“If you say so, Cap,” Alvarado murmured as he looked at the dozens of soldiers below.

Stringer watched them with eyes that missed nothing. He knew his men were growing restless. He could occasionally hear the snort of a horse or the cough of a man as they waited behind the ridge amidst the cover of the ponderosa.

But what the government man meant to pay them for whatever the soldiers pulled out of the earth would be worth the wait.

“M
R
. B
AIRD
, I trust your end of this issue has been taken care of?” the old man asked in a weak, rasping voice.

“I’m afraid there were some complications,” Baird reported without hesitation. “Stringer is well on his way to do our bidding, but Rose refused to work with us. He then escaped before we could dispatch him.”

“Escaped.”

“Yes, sir. Escaped.”

“How?”

“Pure luck, I assure you, sir. An earthquake, in fact.”

“An act of God,” the old man said in his shaky voice. He raised his liver-spotted hand to scratch at his eyebrow. The gold and jewels of the rings on his fingers reflected the light in odd patterns.

Baird fought not to be distracted by it. The silence fell heavy in the room. Dust motes floated by his head in the shaft of light let in by the frosted window. Baird merely waited for the old man to continue.

“Very well. Can his knowledge harm us?”

“Certainly, if ever he were to find all the pieces.” Baird knew better than to hedge his answers.

“Will he?”

“He couldn’t possibly, sir.”

“You believe a man who would be so lucky as to stumble upon an earthquake when one is needed could not possibly have the good fortune to call upon another act of God?”

Baird pressed his lips tightly together to hide his frustration. “Point well made, sir. What would you have me do?”

“Kill him.”

“It’s already in the works, sir.” Baird had hired two men to track Rose down and kill him. The last telegram he’d received had put them somewhere in Nebraska. Baird was confident Rose would find no earthquakes there.

“And Stringer?” the old man asked without acknowledging Baird’s forethought.

“He is quite capable. I have given him the bare bones of our orders and he assures me it will be done.”

The old man smiled. His thin white hair flew in wisps around his head and his heavy eyebrows seemed to weigh down the skin of his forehead, giving him a constant impression of a man scowling. When he smiled his snaggletooth grin, he appeared quite ghastly.

Baird smiled politely. He knew how this game was played. He’d begun his lengthy career as a Pinkerton agent during the War Between the States. He and others like him had acted as spies for the Union army, repeatedly going behind enemy lines to do the bidding of those with higher rank.

Baird had risen quickly. After the war, when the Secret Service Department had been formed to help handle the workload of the US Marshals, Baird had been one of the first ones to be recruited. On the surface, the Secret Service were involved with suppressing the counterfeiting of paper money, which had become popular since the currency of the failed Confederacy so many people had hoarded lost its value. But their reach extended much further than that, and they still performed the duties that had been their beginning; they were tasked with protecting government officials at certain times, and more importantly, they still acted as spies for the government, on both native and foreign soil.

Baird was very good at what he did. He did not like farming out jobs to untrustworthy and unpredictable outlaws.

“Inform me at once when you hear of any news.”

“Yes, sir,” Baird answered as he stood and tipped his head. “A good day to you, General.”

“John,” the general called after him as he turned to take his leave. “You may see fit to make certain your loose ends are tied. If Rose shows his face in New York, you had better not shows yours.”

Baird’s polite smile faltered only slightly. “Yes, General,” he said obediently, cursing under his breath as the heavy door shut behind him.

T
HE
creak of the wagon wheels and the clop of the horses’ hooves were the only sounds that broke the late evening silence as Wash and Flynn traveled south to Junction City. Before setting out the previous evening, they had deputized an extra man they could trust to stay behind in Lincoln and hold down the fort until one of the other marshals returned.

They expected to get into Junction City well before nightfall of their second day of trekking, but both men were veterans of plains travel, and they knew how unpredictable it could be. They had given themselves plenty of leeway. The only problem with leeway was when you didn’t need it. Even with someone to keep you company out on the trail, the silence could be oppressive at times.

“Know anything about these boys?” Flynn finally asked to break up the monotony.

Wash glanced over at him, guiding the cumbersome wagon over the deeply rutted trail with one hand as if it were easy. “Two of them are soldiers of some description,” he answered around the blade of grass he had between his teeth. When the dry goods store had burned down, the town’s tobacco had gone with it. All the men who smoked for a fifty-mile radius had taken to chewing straw as a poor replacement until the new shipments came up the river. Lincoln had been witness to some very cranky town meetings in the meantime.

Flynn pondered sharing with Wash the fact that he had bought more tobacco while up in Stillwater, but got sidetracked by what Wash had said.

“Soldiers,” he repeated. “Indian Wars? Or War Between the States?” he asked dubiously. Surely they weren’t still tracking down deserters and dissenters.

Wash shrugged in answer and clucked his tongue at the plodding mule pulling the wagon. “I don’t think these gentlemen are deserters,” Wash answered neutrally. “I think they’re younger. Regular Army, Indian Wars and all that.”

“Huh. What’d they do?”

“Telegrams didn’t say,” Wash drawled negligently.

Flynn hummed thoughtfully. Not many soldiers got sent back for trial and hanging. The Army needed the numbers and the guns while fighting the Indians, for the most part they didn’t care about their behavior. And if it was something truly heinous, they were usually taken care of on site, before the bureaucrats got hold of it. These boys must have done something particularly interesting to be sent to Fort Smith. Of course, the Ute and Cheyenne wars had ended almost two years ago, and things had been pretty quiet since. Flynn remembered how soldiers could find trouble during peacetime.

These two unfortunates might be examples to keep order.

Flynn never really gave much thought to what their prisoners had done, anyway. He took them where they were supposed to go and went on with life. He claimed that it was hard to watch a man you’d conversed with hang from the gallows, which it was, but it was also easier to not give a damn about the outlaws they met.

Some of them deserved a noose. Some did not.

“The third is a shootist,” Wash continued with a grin. “You might’ve heard of him. Goes by the name of Dusty Rose.”

“No kidding?” Flynn responded with a glance over at Wash. “I have heard of him.”

“Everyone’s heard of him,” Wash said with a laugh of amusement. “He’s in all those damn dime novels they sell back East.”

“Dime novels,” Flynn scoffed with a shake of his head. “They never get anything right.”

Those damn stories made more trouble for people than most anything. If you were unlucky enough to get your name in a dime novel, it was likely you’d have wet-behind-the-ears young guns coming after you from all sides, hoping to make themselves a name by getting the drop on you. Or worse, calling you out across a town square, thinking they were Wild Bill Hickok in
Harper’s
magazine. Flynn shook his head, glad that he and Wash both had managed to escape the fate of fame in their wilder youth.

Dusty Rose had not been so lucky.

“They say he’s just as fast as Doc Holliday,” Flynn added in real interest. “I heard he dealt faro with Doc out in Colorado for a spell.”

Wash laughed softly. It was a low, growling sound that always made Flynn smile. “You curious?” he inquired neutrally.

Flynn looked back at him and slowed his horse, coming abreast of Wash as the man grinned at him.

Wash looped the reins of the wagon around the toe of his boot and reached into his jacket with his good hand. He extracted a dime novel and handed it to Flynn. “Picked it up at the general store before we left,” he said with a small snicker.

Flynn rolled his eyes and reached out to snatch the flimsy story papers from him. Of course a new shipment of dime novels would come in before the tobacco. He looked down at it and pursed his lips, reading the title with a frown. “Best of the West Series: Dusty Rose, the Desert Flower,” he read with a shake of his head.