Ralph Compton The Convict Trail (22 page)

Kane shook his head. “Not a damned thing.”

The man grinned. “Well, no matter. Here's how it's gonna work anyhow. You two leave them Winchesters right where they're at on the bar, and beside them you lay your belt guns. Then, nice as you please, you walk out of here an' keep on walkin'.” Clum's jaw tightened, muscles working under his beard. “Now, I spoke real slow an' laid it out plain, so there would be no misunderstanding.” He hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “Now, set them irons on the bar.”

Kane heard Vito's feet scuff on the dirt floor as he opened distance between them.

Slowly, Kane moved his slicker away from the star on his gun belt. “You understand this, Clum,” he said. To his relief his voice was steady. “My name is Logan Kane, deputy marshal out of Fort Smith, Judge Isaac Parker's court. Now, back off or I'll arrest you for threatening a peace officer.”

“I don't give a damn who you are,” the man answered.

A man standing to his right laughed. “Hey, Zeke, it's been a while since we gunned a lawman, huh?”

“A fair spell I'd say,” Clum said. His voice hardened. “Put your belt gun on the bar.” His eyes shifted to Vito. “You too, pretty boy. I know you got iron under that fancy coat somewhere.”

Clum's thumb was tucked behind his belt, his hand close to his holstered Colt.

This was the last thing Kane wanted, meaningless death in a dugout saloon that had turned out to be an annex of hell. Desperately, he tried to make it go away.

“Levering,” he pleaded, “can you do something?”

The man was grinning. “None of my concern.”

Kane said, “Yeah, I had you figgered for a no-good tinhorn.”

“Ah, the hell with all this talk!” Clum went for his gun.

Kane drew and fired, and a black hole appeared in the middle of Clum's forehead. The man still stood, dead but on his feet, swaying, a thin trickle of blood running over his nose. Clum's eyes turned back in his head, showing yellow traced with fine lines of red.

Vito's .38 barked spitefully. The man to the right of Clum fired, his bullet kicking up dirt at Kane's feet. Then he staggered and took a step back, Vito's lead in him. Kane fired again and again. Clum crashed his length on the floor, and the wounded man next to him, this time hit hard by Kane, threw up his arms and went backward over the table, its spindly legs splintering under him.

The concussion of the guns had put out one of the oil lamps and Kane saw Levering's Remington flame in the smoke-streaked gloom. The man's bullet split the air beside the marshal's ear. Levering stood behind the bar, his gun two-handed at eye level. Kane and Vito fired at the same time, and Levering slammed against the shelf, smashing bottles, and fell, screeching.

Three men were down, and the other two wanted no part of it. If they drew, they'd die. It was a simple premise to understand. The men had backed into a corner, their hands high. One of them screamed, “No, no, don't shoot no more! For God's sake, we're out of it.”

His ears ringing from the gunshots, Kane motioned with his Colt. “Unbuckle them belts an' let them fall to the floor. Now, damn you! Or I'll drop you right where you stand.”

The two men hurriedly did as they were told. “Right, out the door and start walkin'. An' I'd advise you to walk real fast.”

“Mister,” the man who'd done the talking said, “we need time to get our horses.”

Kane's smile was not pleasant to see. “You were gonna make me walk. Now you'll find out how it feels.”

“But it's a long ways to anywhere from here.”

“Yeah, it's a fur piece, so you'd better get goin', hadn't you?”

The writing was on the wall and the man read it clear. “All right, we're leavin', an' be damned to ye,” he said.

“You too,” Kane said to the other man who'd been very quiet, his face ashen. On his way to the door he glanced at Clum's grotesque face. Then his eyes lifted to the marshal. “Zeke was fast on the draw an' shoot. Always reckoned he was anyway.”

“He wasn't even close to bein' fast,” Kane said. “You should find another line o' work, the hardware business maybe.”

The man nodded. “Yeah, maybe that. I sure ain't makin' it in the hoss-stealin' business.”

After the men left, Kane looked at Vito. “You done good. Stood your ground an' got your work in.”

Vito seemed to understand that this was high praise indeed from the big marshal. “Thank you,” he said, smiling. “I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well, afore you start gettin' too uppity, bring them four ponies around front. I've got a purpose fer them.”

Vito's smile grew into a grin. It was just like Kane to tie a compliment on a man, then immediately undo the knot. “Sure thing, Marshal. Anything you say.”

Kane waited until the door closed behind Vito and stepped over to the three men sprawled on the floor. They were all dead. The HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER? sign had fallen from the shelf and lay across Levering's chest.

“She must be right proud of you,” Kane said.

A tin box was lying beside the dead man and the marshal opened it. Inside were thirty-seven dollars in bills and some change. Kane tipped the contents of the box onto the bar, then stepped into the store. He found another ten dollars in a drawer and this he put with the rest of the money.

The door swung open, letting in a gust of sleet and cold air. “Horses are outside,” Vito said.

Kane nodded, picked up the money and walked to the Lipan women. They shrank back from him, their eyes wide and apprehensive. He reached out, grabbed the arm of one of the women and thrust the forty-seven dollars into her hand.

He smiled, trying to put the women at ease, and pointed to the door. In his halting Spanish he said,
“Hay fuera de los caballos.”

Uncertain, the Apaches did not move, their unblinking stare on Kane's face. The woman he'd given the money to opened her hand, looking at it. The marshal tried a smile again, reached out and gently closed her fingers around the bills. Again he pointed to the door.
“Caballos.”

Now the Lipan women understood. They walked to the door and, Vito holding it open for them, stepped outside. By the time Kane walked into the sleet and cold, the women were already mounted, one of them leading the spare horse. The Lipans rode away and were soon swallowed by distance and the brawling storm.

Vito looked at Kane. “Think they'll make it in this weather?”

The marshal nodded. “Better than we will. They've got money and four horses and they're going back to their people rich.”

“Where are their people?” Vito asked, his eyes on Kane's face.

“Who knows. If any of them are still alive, the women will find them.”

Kane stepped to the door. “We'll load up with whatever supplies we can find. I don't want to stay around with dead men.”

Vito's quick nod and the hurried cross he made on his chest were all the agreement the marshal needed.

Chapter 24

The storm was driving cold and hard from the north, and Kane and Vito Provanzano rode right into its bared teeth, heads bent against the brutal force of the wind.

Five miles south of Walker Mountain, in rolling, forested country, they picked up a large pack of red wolves that kept pace with them for an hour, slipping through the pines like phantoms.

Kane saw Vito look in the wolves' direction and he raised his voice to be heard above the roar of the blizzard. “They'll give us the road. They don't usually tackle anything bigger than a jackrabbit.”

“Yeah? Well just maybe they're feeling a tad unusual today,” Vito yelled. Sleet had frozen on his mustache and eyebrows, giving him the look of a worried old man.

The marshal laughed loud and long, and it felt good. Finally he said, “If they get close, the wolves may spook the horses, so ride careful.”

The wolves left them when they crossed fast-running Jones Creek and rode into flatlands where the sleet storm loomed ahead, coming at them like a broken plaster wall. Kane swung to the west, toward the foothills of Walker Mountain, signaling his move by thumping Vito on the shoulder, since talk was impossible over the shrill shriek of the storm.

It took Kane an hour to find shelter. He saw a deep hollow where the spreading branches of a couple of tall, twin pines were keeping away the worst of the sleet that was now mixed with wet snow.

There was room enough for the horses, and wood aplenty among the trees. And Kane built a small fire in the overhang of the hollow where it would reflect heat. He filled the coffeepot with handfuls of the sleety snow that had piled up around them.

“Soon be as comfortable as your grandmother's parlor,” he told Vito, grinning. But the man merely shivered, pulled his coat closer around him and said nothing.

Kane had found salt pork and a small sack of army biscuit in Levering's store. The flat hardtack was as solid as iron and the marshal guessed it had been stored by the Army since the War Between the States and reissued during the Indian wars.

He wetted down the biscuit and pounded it into crumbs with the butt of his rifle. He dredged slices of salt pork in the crumbs, then fried them in the sizzling hot fry pan.

“This,” he promised Vito, “is going to be good eatin'.”

The man glanced at the sputtering pork and shrugged. “If you say so, Marshal.”

“Hell, don't turn up your nose at good food,” Kane said. “What do you boys eat in New Orleans anyhow?”

Vito thought about it, smiling at what could only be pleasant memories. “Lots of pasta of course, and minestrone soup often. Veal Sorrentina, Lobster Fra Diavalo, Shrimp and Portabella Crostini, focaccia bread.” Vito raised baleful eyes to the marshal. “Served by a waiter wearing white gloves and the key to the wine cellar around his neck.”

Kane smiled. “Well, I don't have none o' that stuff, but I'll be your waiter.” He lifted the pan off the fire and waved the smoking salt pork under Vito's nose. “Shuck your knife an' get dug into that.”

 

The storm raged with increasing ferocity throughout the long, cold night. Kane and Vito huddled as close to the feeble fire as they could while the trees above them rocked in the wind and icy gusts of sleet splattered over them. The storm sounded like a passing freight train and the air smelled like a steel blade, razor sharp and cutting.

Once Kane woke from a shallow sleep and thought he heard the haunting howls of hunting wolves among the pines. He sat up and listened into the night: nothing—only the clamor of the storm. Uneasy now, Kane lay on his back, his eyes staring at darkness. Had he heard wolves or the wails of the unburied dead?

One, he decided, disturbed, was as likely as the other.

 

Like a child's tantrum that ends in tears, the storm blew itself out an hour before daybreak and only a steady, raking rain remained.

The fire had long since sizzled into a tendril of smoke. Kane and Vito drank cold coffee, then took to the trail.

Baines Flat was on the other side of the Poteau River, an hour's ride to the north. A trellis bridge, built for a railroad that had never arrived, spanned a stretch of white-water narrows and now carried only horse traffic. Beyond the town rose the rugged barrier of Poteau Mountain and fifteen miles to the west lay the badlands of the Choctaw Nation.

As far as Kane could recall, and this he told Vito, the population of Baines Flat was mostly hard-rock gold and silver miners, hoping to strike it rich along the sprawling ridge of the Poteau. Like the railroad, the gold had never materialized, yet a few hardy souls were still searching for the mother lode, but finding silver only in their hair.

Talking above the angry-cat hiss of the rain, Kane said, “To the west, in the Choctaw country, there's a standing stone on the Poteau with some kind of writing on it. One time Judge Parker talked to me about it. He said the letters were called runes and were carved by Viking men who crossed the big eastern ocean in ships hundreds of years ago.” He smiled. “I don't know about that, but the writing is on the rock fer sure, an' it wasn't ciphered there by no Indian.”

“You've seen it?” Vito asked.

“Yeah, I've seen it. Strange to find that rock in the middle of a wilderness where there's nothing and nobody. Kinda like Baines Flat. It shouldn't be where it is either.”

The river came in sight through the shifting steel curtain of the rain, and in the distance Poteau Mountain shouldered hugely against the gray sky. As their horses' hooves thudded across the pine bridge, Kane looked ahead, taking stock of the town as his eyes roamed restlessly for any hint of Stringfellow and the rest.

Even by the modest standards of the West, Baines Flat was not much of a town. And it was made even shabbier by the glowering black sky and streaming rain that was gradually turning its only street into a river of mustard-colored mud.

The centerpiece of the settlement was a false-fronted, two-story building that proudly proclaimed, TONTINE HOTEL and under that, BEDS & EATS.

Flanking the hotel were a couple of saloons, the Alamo and the Bucket of Blood. A hardware store, livery stable and corral, a blacksmith's shop and what looked to be an adobe jail were the only other buildings. On either side of the town, scattered tarpaper shacks and smoking, crooked iron chimneys poking through sod roofs appeared to have wandered into the plains and then lost their way.

Adding to the dreariness of the place was a rickety gallows standing outside the jail, decorated with red, white and blue bunting that slapped against the rough timbers of the platform, wet and forlorn in the wind.