The Bold Frontier (20 page)

The Rev. Billy Watters married them in the Poker Chip Saloon, with Sherm Clagfield standing up for them. Sherm had a cabin back in the hills, so they got into Tubbs’ buggy and drove off for a little holiday. Tubbs didn’t seem at all unhappy about the shotgun, or rather six-gun, aspect of the marriage. And so they rolled out of Deadwood, Poker Alice Duffield Tubbs, queen of the gambling halls from Colorado to the Dakotas, and W. G. (for George) Tubbs. The gentleman gambler and the lady who smoked cigars.

I
N THE SMALL MINING
community of Sierra that day, the talk ran mostly to the weather. The ominous keening of the wind as it swept down out of the gray sky from the looming mountains seemed to lift the level of talk to a plane of high excitement. The first signs of winter, dead, isolating, bone-chilling winter, came blowing down the mountain with the wind. The old timers who sat perched on barrels in the Mercantile, greasy wads of chawin’ tabac rotating in their cheeks, predicted the first big storm of the season. And in the Sierra, the first storm meant excitement, even if it was excitement of a familiar kind.

Marshal Trow Huston had passed the cool mountain summer and the sharper, more exhilarating autumn in relative peace. A drunken brawl now and then offered little disturbance to the taciturn, thirtyish-looking marshal’s peace of mind. The crazy miner who had started shooting up the girls in one of the town’s leading service establishments had folded up as soon as the marshal put in an appearance, heavy Colt in fist, blue eyes reproachful.

Perhaps, Huston reflected, finishing his evening meal in the hotel dining room, I’m getting old and set in my ways. Thirty-one, calendar-wise, was not old. But thirty-one, after the black days of Yankee slaughtering Reb with sabre and pitchfork and whatever else happened to be lying around the embattled meadows and farm towns, was ancient. War had soured him, he realized.

After the war, Sierra had seemed like a quiet and ideal place to settle. He’d worked on the mountain, mining his living from the rich lode, and taken the marshal’s job under pressure from the handful of civic-minded citizens after the other marshal, an old man, died of a heart attack one Christmas Eve.

That was four years ago. He’d been growing less conscientious every day since, hoping more and more that the town would remain peaceful. A quiet hatred of violence had festered in him all the long years since the war. Perhaps one day, a younger man, with memories unscarred, would come along and take his place. When the former marshal died no one else had been available, and no one seemed available now. So he was stuck in the job for a while.

Huston pushed back his chair. He lit a cigar as he strolled through the lobby into the adjoining saloon. He watched with a feeling of satisfaction as the bartender scraped the foam off a schooner of beer with his stick and handed it over. Huston took a sip.

“The big snow’s on the way, appears like,” the bartender said amiably.

Shots racketed out in the street. Huston put down the schooner and whirled around, his body going tense. Eyes swiveled toward him. He walked quickly to the doors, pushed through and glanced up and down the street.

Three horsemen came pounding toward him. A gun exploded behind them on the Mercantile’s front steps. Huston dragged out his Colt as the men galloped past. All three wore heavy coats and had their hats pulled down over shadowed faces.

“Hey there!” one of them shouted as they rode by. “There’s the saloon!” The rider’s gun exploded and the other two men fired after him. Huston ducked instinctively, realizing a moment later when he heard the plate glass window smash that they had been aiming for him. He fired one useless shot after them, but they had disappeared in the darkness at the end of the street … the darkness on the trail that led up the mountain.

The batwings flapped open behind him. A crowd of men, babbling excitedly, poured out. “Who was it?” one of them exclaimed. “See ’em, Trow?”

“Couldn’t make them out,” Huston replied. “But Amos is making a lot of noise up at the Mercantile. I’ll go have a look.” He shoved his Colt back into the holster and started to walk, followed by several of the men who conjectured loudly over the identity of the riders.

Amos Dean, owner of the Mercantile, stood on the broad front stoop of his store, pistol in hand. He stood in the cold night air without a coat, mindless of the chill his thin shirt and flowered vest couldn’t keep out. In the light of the lantern in his other hand, his blue eyes snapped excitedly.

“Hello, Trow. Glad you got here.”

“Who were they?” Huston noticed that the Mercantile’s front door hung crookedly on its hinges, minus glass, as if it had been smashed open.

“Dogged if I know,” Amos Dean said. “But they stole three suits of clothes, and three of my best sheep-lined coats, and six-guns and a whole bucketful of lead to fill ’em up with. And that ain’t all.” He jerked his head inside. “Come see.”

Huston and the curious onlookers followed the short storekeeper into the darkened interior. Dean held his lantern high so that light fell on a pile of rough clothes lying in the center aisle. Dean put down his pistol and lifted a pair of trousers with broad black and white stripes. “Get an eyeful of these, marshal.”

“Convict suits,” Huston said. A warning bell went ringing in his brain.

“I swear if I’d made trouble, they’d of shot me down,” Dean said with a shake of his head. “Mean looking, all of them. And they were about froze, wearing only these duds.” His blue eyes narrowed. “You’re going after them, ain’t you, marshal?”

“Why sure, I suppose so.”

“They can’t get very far, if they don’t know the trail over the mountain,” one of the men in the crowd said. “ ‘Sides, it’s dark, and there’s a snow coming.”

“I’ll get a posse together,” Huston said. “Round up a dozen men and—”

“Posse!” Dean snorted. “By the time you try to find enough guns around here, they’ll be half way back to Kansas. You got to get after them right away, marshal. Hell, they’re owlhoots from some prison, that’s plain enough. And it’s your job to catch ’em. Besides,” he added in a grumble, “I want those duds and my guns back. I can’t afford to lose merchandise like that.” He glowered at the marshal.

“I don’t know,” Huston said, shaking his head. “I don’t like to start up the mountain by myself—”

Dean’s lips curled. “What’s the matter, Trow? You goin’ yellow of a sudden?”

Huston’s eyes flared wide. “You’ve got no call to say that.”

“No? It seems to me, Trow, these last months you’ve been mighty careful to keep your nose clean. You act like you’re gettin’ right scared of any jasper with a hogleg in his hand. If that’s the kind of marshal you are, you aren’t doing anybody in this town any good.”

A murmur of assent followed his words. Huston whirled around to the other men. Eyelids lowered. Mouths clamped shut like traps. Somebody chewed a plug loudly.

In that instant, Dean’s words lanced into Huston’s brain. The very thing he’d been thinking while he ate. More and more he was coming to want security—safety for himself—when it was his job to guarantee safety to the other residents of the town, even if it meant personal risk. What a damned fool I am, he thought now. I’ve just become aware of it and they’ve seen it for—how many weeks, and months? Still, it didn’t lessen the fact that the men who had robbed Dean were escaped prisoners, probably killers with nothing to lose in killing one man more. He was still afraid, with the terrible fear of death, a black unknown void, born in him when cannon thundered on the battlefields.

“All right,” Huston said softly. “I’ll go after them.”

He shouldered his way through the silent crowd and walked down the front steps. He turned right, walking quickly until he reached the rude wooden building that served as his office and Sierra’s jail. Lamps glowed yellow through the windows. Pink Fisher, his black-haired twenty-year-old deputy, was waiting for him. Pink usually laughed a lot. Tonight he was frowning.

“Howdy, Trow,” he said, his voice quiet. Immediately he walked back toward the first of the jail’s three cells. “Come take a took at what we got.”

Huston followed him. Pink pointed. A boy hardly more than fifteen or sixteen lay on the cell bunk, his pale face turned to the light, looking delicate and thin as fine china. Beneath the thrown-back coat, an irregular stain of blood had dried on his shirt front.

“Deader than anything,” Pink said. “Jake Robards found him on the trail less than ten minutes ago. This was inside his shirt pocket.” He handed Huston a slip of yellow paper.

One edge of the paper bore a brownish stain. Huston recognized the handwriting of Lem Swope, a justice of the peace in a town down the mountain.
Three escaped criminals headed your way,
the note ran.
Gall, Cody, Elwood. Watch out for them, Trow. They are dangerous. Lem.

Huston crumpled the paper. He’d had a poster on Bart Gall a few months before. Wanted for stage holdups, and two murders in Sacramento. Evidently prison couldn’t hold him. Huston remembered the mean, pinch-eyed face in the poster sketch and shuddered.

“These are the same gents who did the shooting a little while ago,” Huston said. “Robbed the Mercantile of some clothes and extra guns.”

“I heard the shooting, but they brought the boy in just then. Sorry I couldn’t make it down.”

Huston didn’t answer. He was thinking of this boy, sent to warn Sierra and being ambushed with what had perhaps been Bart Gall’s last shot. Maybe the boy’d spotted them; or made too much noise following them. Whatever happened, he’d wound up dead on a cell bunk with the mountain wind singing his funeral dirge outside.

Huston pulled his heavy sheep-lined coat off the wall, put it on. He rummaged through his desk for more ammunition and put the surplus in his coat.

Yes, Dean was right. He had yellowed. He was yellow now; scared because up in the mountains Bart Gall was riding toward an escape through the pass. There was no other way he could go. And Huston knew he had to go after him. His job was to protect the people of Sierra, not himself.

There was nothing wrong in being afraid, he knew that. The wrong part was letting the fear rule you. Being alone too much, no wife, no family, he thought of the war a great deal. And it had soured him. But now he knew he had to ride up the mountain and try to stop Bart Gall and the two other killers before they reached the pass. He
had
to, because now that he knew, something in him grew sick at the idea of being ruled by fear. A man couldn’t live that way.

Pink shoved his arms into his coat. “I’m coming along, Trow.” It was a statement, not a question. He strapped his guns across his lean hips.

Huston faced him. “Pink, let me ask you something. Have I gone yellow?”

Pink didn’t answer for a minute. Then: “Why, Trow, I don’t see why you ask something like that.”

“Have I, Pink?” Huston’s eyes burned fiercely.

Pink turned his back on him, shrugging. “People talk, Trow. I don’t give it much heed—”

“What about you? How do you feel about it?”

Pink turned around again, a touch of sadness in his eyes. “Trow, I don’t like to say it, but if you ask me, I guess I’ll tell you. You act like you’re scared to make a move any more. Almost scared to raise your voice to a drunk.” He looked down at the rough plank floor. “I’m sorry, Trow.”

The wind made a mad whining around the corners of the jail. “That’s all right, Pink.” Huston clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “We’ll go out and bring those three back and maybe I won’t be yellow any more.” A note of self-inflicted bitterness edged Huston’s voice.

“Sure, Trow.” Pink smiled wanly. “We’ll bring them back.”

Huston jerked the door open. The wind lashed his face with new fury, stronger now, bitter with the bone-cold feel of winter. They bent against the wind as they made their way around the jail to the stable at the rear. Each man saddled his own horse by lantern light. Neither one spoke. The animals blew out their breath in long streams of vapor and stamped frequently. At last Huston extinguished the lantern and swung up into the saddle. He made sure his rifle rested tightly in the boot and gave a tug on the reins. Silently the two men headed up the main street toward the mountain trail.

Huston figured the outlaws might make camp for the night in Moon Hollow, an old ghost town half way up the mountain to the pass. Pink agreed with this estimate. They rode rapidly, hoofs rattling with sharp sounds on the rocky soil, their only light the pale glow of the stars outlining the shadow-forms of the great trees. They had been on the trail perhaps twenty minutes when a few snowflakes began to drift down, big and soft and wet. Huston licked one from his upper lip.

How in God’s name can we find them?
he wondered dismally. Up here there was nothing but a barren waste of lonely trees and hard earth. The cold pierced to the very heart of him, lulling him in the saddle, filling him with a sense of helplessness. When the rifle cracked, he was a moment late in reacting.

He jerked the reins wildly, pulling his horse off the trail. More shots racketed from up ahead, dim orange smudges behind the thickening wall of white snow. Huston dropped from the saddle and fired a futile shot in answer.

He listened. Somewhere up ahead he heard muffled voices.
Damn,
he thought,
a moment longer and they’d have gotten us, just like they got that kid. We came too fast, too loudly.

Another shot boomed. He heard the slug bite a tree two feet above him. Then silence, and the soft whisper of the snow, coming faster now, driven by the rising wind.

Hoofs clattered in the darkness ahead. Then there was a rapid volley of three shots. Pink’s horse went bucketing down the trail toward Sierra, flinging noisy echoes behind it. Huston saw that the saddle was empty. His stomach went hollow.

The outlaws moved further away up the trail. Huston fumbled in the darkness until his hands came into contact with an arm, stretched out rigidly. Shifting around on his heels so that his back was to the pass, he struck a match and cupped it in his stiff fingers.

Pink lay hatless on the snow. Mouth wide open, he stared upward with a grotesque kind of smile. A flake drifted down into his mouth. The match burned Huston’s fingers and he turned away.