Sliphammer (3 page)

The engine whistle startled Warren. He turned slowly in time to see big old Virg looking at Wyatt with the kind of stare he might have used on a stranger whom he didn't know and didn't want to meet.

The train started up, with a curious half-scared knot of pedestrians starting to appear in the yards. Wyatt Earp slammed the door shut. Warren heard him growl, “I'm sick of Arizona anyway.”

Two

Jeremiah Tree sat his horse on the hillside, crossed one leg over the saddle horn and packed his pipe without hurry, lazy in the heat, a craggy, big man with a weathered, sun-squinted face and leathery little creases crosshatching the brown back of his neck. All around him the desert was in flower—Spanish bayonet, yucca, hummingbird bushes, chollas, staghorns, ironwoods, cat-tlaw, Joshuas, mesquite, paloverde, prickly pe'ar, ocotillo and the little red ones some drunken botanist had labeled with punful helplessness
Echinocereus damdifino.
Damned if I know, yeah. Didn't matter if you knew their names anyway. The blossoming beauty of riotous color was a brief annual discovery that always made him feel as if he was going back to some very primitive and basic thing, an innocence and cleanliness long gone.

He put the pipe in a corner of his wide mouth but did not light it. It was too hot to smoke. He sat looking down at the ranch, where the sun seemed to set the corrugated metal shed roofs afire. The hot wind rubbed itself against him with abrasive dryness.

He had been sitting here for an hour, watching the two saddled horses ground-hitched in the ranch yard below. He had a fair idea what the two of them were doing inside, and he didn't want to interrupt. He chewed on his pipe and waited. Absently, his left hand hooked itself for comfort over the hammer of his hip-holstered six-gun. It was a good fast gun: a fighting man's gun. Forty-five center fire single action with a 4%-inch barrel and a front sight that had been filed down low and smooth so it wouldn't get caught on the holster coming out. It was a sliphammer six-gun: it had no trigger inside the oval guard; the hammer spur had been sawed off, cut down, and rewelded in place halfway down the back of the hammer. The hammer spring had been filed with care. It took a great deal of experience and practice to use a sliphammer gun effectively, but once the technique was learned—scraping the ball of the thumb fast over the lowered hammer spur—a sliphammer shooter could fire three times as fast as a man with a trigger, and far more accurately than an idiot who fanned.

Jeremiah Tree went with the gun: he had a workmanlike look. His face was the color of the worn walnut handle of the gun. His eyes were the color of the metal at the gun's muzzle where holster friction had worn off the bluing: the silver color of a freshly minted .45 slug, before corrosion dulled the lead. His skin had the texture of holster leather softened by countless saddle soap-ings. His shirt had been washed too often; the sleeves had shrunk halfway up his forearms. His long-legged stovepipe Levi's were faded and white-threaded.

His hair was thick and black, curling out under the stained hat, and generally he had the look of an Indian or a half-breed, though he was neither: both parents had been Scotch-Irish. A history of fights was recorded in the myriad ^minor scars and half dozen major ones on his exposed face and hands; victories were implied by the fact that he was neither disfigured nor crippled.

The only clue to his present occupation was the pair of pinholes in the left breast patch pocket of his shirt. He wasn't wearing a badge today.

Alerted by movement in the porch shadows, he straightened in the saddle and put his boots back into the stirrups. Down there he saw Caroline come out into sight and lift one hand to shade her eyes, looking toward the western horizon. Jeremiah Tree gigged his horse gently downhill.

She hadn't seen him yet; she was looking the other way. As Tree rode switchbacking down the hillside, he saw Rafe come out of the house ramming his shirt tails into his Levi's and then sweeping the disheveled hair back out of his eyes. Rafe walked up behind Caroline, reached under her arms and laid both hands on her breasts. The girl tipped her head back against his shoulder.

Tree's face showed no break in expression. He was thinking of what Caroline's father had said to him a month ago:
I tried to talk her out of it, Sliphammer boy. Honest to God I did. I told her not to marry your brother because he just ain't tough enough for her. She'll put spurs to him one time when she ain't even thanking about it, and she'll rip him to shreds ‘thout ever knowing how it happened.

He brought his horse around the end of the porch. He heard crickets in the trees down by the spring. A hawk drifted above the house; a dog lay asprawl under the porch, panting in the shade.

Sliphammer Tree said, “Whose dog is that?”

Rafe had taken his hands down off Caroline's breasts when he'd heard the hoofbeats. Now they were holding hands. Rafe said, “Beats me. Stray, I reckon.”

“Lo the bride and groom,” said Sliphammer with a little smile at Caroline. Husky and blonde, she made him think of haystacks. She had a sturdy, firm body; her breasts seemed so tightly packed and swollen that one good squeeze might bring forth a squirting shower of juices. She had the eyes of an alert doe stepping into a strange clearing.

Caroline said, “Do you like the place?”

Sliphammer had been inspecting the ranch. The buildings were weathered and tumbledown, with the look of abandonment. He said, “It looks lived in—hard to tell by what.”

“Snakes and roaches, mainly,” said Rafe. He was young and very earnest: half amazed by- his own possession of this vibrant, vital girl-wife he had, he had turned eager and flushed, and impatient with ambition. It troubled Tree but he had said nothing in the past week; once they had got married it had seemed too late for avuncular advice. The kid would have to make his own mistakes.

Rafe seemed irritable just now: his brown eyes flashed erratically. He was chunky and broad through chest and shoulder; in a few more years when he filled out completely he would be a powerful man. His jaw was wide and blunt. He had Sliphammer's long bladed nose and the shape of his cheekbones and eyes was the same, but his bone structure was heavier, less graceful, and his coloring was lighter. They had shared the same father but different mothers: the frontier was hard on women.

Rafe said, “Damn it, do you like the place?”

“Looks like you've already got your minds set on it. Do you need my approval?”

Rafe's chest swelled but Caroline cut him off: she said, “We think we can make a good place out of it, Jerr.”

She was the only one who'd ever called him that. He'd been called Jeremiah, Jerry, Jeremy, and Sliphammer. The West didn't seem satisfied with a man until it had surrounded him with descriptive nicknames. Caroline's father called her the Milkmaid, and truly she looked like one. Rafe was known as Wrangler Tree because his specialty was horses.

The house creaked, settling. Rafe said in a pushy, defiant voice, “Make a goddamn good horse ranch out of this outfit. Take a little cash and a lot of sweat but we'll do it proud.”

In spite of himself Sliphammer said, “You'll do as you see fit, I reckon, but maybe it's a little early to chance it on your own. First of all you haven't got the money to buy the place, and if you do it on borrowed cash all it'll take will be one bad season to wipe you out. A man ought to have a nest egg before he goes into business on his own.”

“We'll take the chance.”

“That's what the last fellow thought who owned this place. Why do you think it's up for sheriff's auction?”

“Because the last fellow didn't know how to run a ranch, which is not my weakness,” Rafe snapped. “For a man who's worked for wages all his life you're mighty free with your advice, Jeremy. I'm a married man and Caroline deserves a whole lot better than a thirty-a-month wrangler. You work your whole life for dirt wages and end up with nothing to show for it and when you die your friends got to take up a collection to bury you. That ain't for Caroline and me.”

Caroline pushed her lower lip forward to blow hair off her forehead. Sliphammer said to her, “You agree with that?”

“If I didn't I wouldn't be here.”

“Hell,” said Rafe, “I got to admit it was Caroline's idea in the first place.”

I should have known,
Sliphammer thought. What he said was, “With a little luck I guess you might make it.” There was no point in arguing with them.

“Bet your ass we'll make it,” said Rafe. Caroline blushed, and Sliphammer found that faintly surprising.

Rafe lifted his arm and pointed. “Somebody coming.”

Sliphammer turned to follow his gaze. He had to tip his head to get the sun out of his eyes. A rider was coming down the blossoming slope, neither hurrying nor wasting time. Rafe said, “Looks like your boss.”

It was in fact the sheriff, Bob Paul. He had a pinched, exasperated look on his heavy-jowled face. Paul had spent his whole life in the saddle but he still managed to look like a sack of potatoes on horseback. He was a rounded man, rounded everywhere: his thighs looked soft, his shoulders were matronly, his darkly beard-slurred face was puffy. He was a solemn, slow-moving man, a good sheriff, an acceptable boss, a casual friend.

Paul's greeting was dour. “The one day in the year I really need you, you're galivant-ing way the hell out here. Don't you thank I've got better thangs to do than chase all over Pima County thew this heat? H'are you, Wrangler? Missus Caroline?”

Paul touched his hat. Sliphammer was smiling, not rising to the bait; he said mildly, “Even us slaves get a day off now and then.”

Paul removed his hat and wiped his face in the crook of his sleeve. “My frin, I'm jis gonna have to hang a bell on you.”

“I repeat,” Sliphammer said good-humoredly, “it's my day off. You want to talk to me today, pay me an extra two dollars.”

“Ain't nothing like a loyal deputy,” Paul complained with a great show of indignation. “And as for these kin of yours, you ever notice how these young folks lose all their manners? Ain't nobody invited me to step down and take a little drank.”

Rafe said, “You're welcome to light down. There's nothing to drink here until somebody deans out the well. Or you can go down to the spring.”

Paul climbed down with a fat man's sigh. “Get that well fixed soon as somebody buys the place at auction next month. You still in the market?”

“Bet your ass.”

“Likely you'll have to scramble some, then. Get yoseff plenty of money. Fellow from Prescott's gonna brang me a bid of three thousand dollars, I hear.”

Rafe's face fell. Caroline said, “
Three
thousand?”

“That's what I heard,” said Paul, and turned toward Sliphammer. “Rat now you and me got binness.”

“It's still my day off.”

“Neither one of us gonna get no more days off for a while, Jeremy. We got ourselves a little chore up to Colorado.”

“Colorado?”

Paul nodded. He tramped over to the shady corner of the house and sat down on the sagging edge of the porch, his face pearled with sweat. “Come acrosst here and set down.”

Sliphammer went over and sat by him. Rafe and Caroline hovered, listening, and Paul made no effort to chase them off. He said, “Superior Court put out a fugitive bench warrant for the Stillwell murder last nat.”

“On the Earp crowd?”

“Just so. Wyatt Earp made a mistake pointing his fanger at Frank Stillwell—Stillwell had a lot of frinds and one or two of them got the Governor's ear. Got a lot of Texas cowmen in Arizona that never did like the Earp gang, just lookin' for an excuse like this. Now, Stillwell got killed in this jurisdiction, and that makes it our job to brang the Earps back from Colorado.”

Paul looked up at him. His fat face seemed boyish and sorrowful. “It sets up like this, Jeremy. The gang busted up after Stillwell got killed. Texas Jack and a couple others got lynched to death over to New Mexico, which leaves three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. Now, Virgil went on back to Ohio with Morgan's body. Ain't nobody interested in crucifying Virgil—he's crippled up anyway, everybody knows he couldn't of shot anybody. But I got these warrants for Doc Holliday and Wyatt and Warren Earp. They all up in Colorado—Holliday's bucking faro in Denver and the other two, they over to Gunnison on the southwest slope of the Rockies. Up to you and me to serve the warrants, boy.”

When Sliphammer didn't speak, Paul glanced at him again and said morosely, “I can't go both places at once, Jeremy.”

“So I'm elected to arrest Doc Holliday?”

“No. The Denver police will do that.”

“Then—”

“Aeah. I got to be the one to go to Denver, you see—I got to get the Governor of Colorado to sign the extradition papers before we can arrest anybody. You got to be the one goes to Gunnison, Jeremy.”

Wyatt Earp. Tree studied the toes of his sunwhacked boots and wondered how much registered on his face. It was unthinkable—like trying to arrest Robin Hood or Ulysses or Buffalo Bill.

Sheriff Paul's voice droned on: “You ain't to arrest them, not at first anyhow. While I'm dickering with the Governor I want you in Gunnison where you can keep your eye on Wyatt and his brother. Soon as I get the papers signed in Denver, I'll send you a telegraph ware, you get the sheriff down there to hep you. I don't know how many deputies he's got but I reckon you'll get plenty of hep. All you got to worry about is branging them back here and making damn sure they don't bust loose.”

“Uh-hunh,” Sliphammer said absently.

Half the porch length away, Rafe was unable to contain himself: he blurted, “Sheriff, you think Wyatt Earp'll take kindly to the idea of being brought back to Arizona to get hung?”

The sheriff gave him a long, slow look. “Why, no, son, I don't thank he'll take kandly to it at all.”