The Old Wolves

Old Dog, New Tricks

“Shut up,” Elwyn said out of the side of his mouth.

Then he drew. A half a wink later, the others drew their own weapons.

Spurr's old instincts had kicked in. He'd sensed it coming . . . as though he'd inadvertently been reading Elwyn's mind. Spurr's hand jerked across his belly, unsheathed the Starr .44, and ratcheted the hammer back.

It belched smoke and fire in Spurr's knobby hand.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam-Bam!

Two of the three hard cases were blown back out through the jailhouse's open door and into the street.

Louis was the fastest of the three, and he got off two shots. One kissed the nap of Spurr's coat sleeve before ricocheting off the cell door with an ear-ringing clang. The other, fired just after Spurr's first bullet had torn a quarter-sized hole in his heart, was triggered into his own left ankle.

He staggered forward, pinwheeled, and hit the floor on his back.

Silence.

Spurr's gun smoke wafted in the lantern-lit room. The fledgling fire, whose weak flames had dwindled, softly cracked and popped.

Behind Spurr, Boomer Drago whistled. “You old coot. You still got a few left in the chamber.”

Spurr looked down at the Starr and the old hand wrapped around it . . .

“Yeah, I got a few,” he said.

Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold

The Rusty Spurr Series

THE OLD WOLVES

THE LAST LAWMAN

The .45-Caliber Series

.45-CALIBER CROSS FIRE .45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP

.45-CALIBER DESPERADO .45-CALIBER MANHUNT

.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND .45-CALIBER FURY

.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER

The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series

THE DEVIL'S LAUGHTER

THE DEVIL'S WINCHESTER

HELLDORADO

THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS

THE DEVIL'S LAIR

STARING DOWN THE DEVIL

THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE

RIDING WITH THE DEVIL'S MISTRESS

DEALT THE DEVIL'S HAND

THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

The Rogue Lawman Series

GALLOWS EXPRESS COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL

BORDER SNAKES DEADLY PREY

BULLETS OVER BEDLAM ROGUE LAWMAN

The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series

HELL ON WHEELS ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER

ONCE LATE WITH A .
38
ONCE A LAWMAN

ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN ONCE MORE WITH A .
44

ONCE A RENEGADE ONCE A MARSHAL

THE OLD WOLVES

PETER BRANDVOLD

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

THE OLD WOLVES

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2013 by Peter Brandvold.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

BERKLEY
^®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eISBN: 978-1-101-62466-1

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley mass-market edition / August 2013

Cover illustration by Bruce Emmett.

Cover design by Edwin Tse.

Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For my old wolves,

Stella and Thor

ONE

Spurr was old. He'd give his detractors that much. And his ticker was chugging to a slow stop. It would soon leave him in a cold grave, bedding down with angleworms and diamondbacks.

He'd give them that much, too.

But by god, his eyes and his ears were as keen as ever.

So was his sniffer. And if that wasn't man sweat he'd just sniffed on the wet wind blowing at him just now in this Indian Nations hollow, on a cold, damp, early autumn night, then by god, he'd toss in his badge like his boss, Chief Marshal Henry Brackett, was urging him to do, and he'd retire to his drafty two-room cabin on the slopes of Mount Rosalie.

(He could not, would not call that grand peak west of Denver, the crown jewel of the northern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Mount Evans. No, sir. He'd first known it as Mount Rosalie when he'd come west several years before the Little Misunderstanding Between the States, and that's how he'd know it until he stopped knowing
anything
—the politicians be damned!)

He reined his big roan, Cochise, to a sudden halt along the soggy trail he'd been following in the outlaw-infested Nations. The sour-smelling sweat—the stench of a man who'd been drinking liberally and hadn't bathed in a month of Sundays—drifted past his nose once more. A light flashed in the tangle of woods off the trail's right side. A quarter second later, a bullet buzzed past Spurr's right ear and pinged ominously off the shale embankment behind and to his left.

As the rifle's flat, menacing crack reached Spurr's ears, the old marshal yelled angrily and leapt down off of Cochise's back, ramming the butt of his rifle against the horse's hindquarters, sending him buck-kicking on up the night-dark trail and out of another possible bullet's path.

Spurr crouched in the middle of the rutted, weedy two-track, pumping a fresh cartridge into the rifle's breech, and squeezed off three quick rounds toward where he'd seen the orange flash of the dry gulcher's gun. He lowered the old 1866 First Model Winchester repeater—his detractors could shove their newer weapons where the sun don't shine!—and ran into the brush and burr oaks and flaming sumacs dripping from the recent rain, in the direction he'd seen the shooter's gun flash, and hunkered down behind the bole of a stout maple.

Lightning flashed erratically in the north, to his left, briefly illuminating the woods around him. He could see no sign of the shooter, only the weblike branches and boles of the deciduous forest lining this river bottom.

Moving forward, he held his cocked Winchester up high across his chest, glancing down only to make sure he wasn't about to trip over a deadfall. He ducked under low branches and heard the rain start again, ticking softly against the brim of his battered brown Stetson.

A crackling peal of thunder hammered the woods. Spurr felt the reverberation through his boots. Lightning flashed, turning the sky into a vast white candle. It revealed a man-shaped shadow in the corner of his right eye.

Spurr wheeled.

A sharp-nosed young man in a denim jacket and wet felt hat screamed savagely and bolted toward the old lawman, raising a large knife in his left hand while his other arm hung slack at his side.

As the sky turned dark again, Spurr's rifle roared, orange flames stabbing into the darkness. Spurr racked another round but held fire as he probed the darkness that appeared twice as dark after the lightning flash than it had before.

Nothing moved. He stepped forward, holding the rifle like a bayonet out in front of him.

Lightning flashed again, briefer than before. But in that half second, Spurr saw the sharp-nosed kid lying back in a tangle of branches, half standing, both arms now hanging slack at his sides. During another flash, Spurr saw that the kid was who he'd thought he was—young Brine Gatling. Spurr's first shots from the trail had nearly blown off the young brigand's wrist while the last spate had bibbed his chest with blood and nearly blown off his lower jaw.

It hung at a slant, blood bubbling down the corner of the kid's sagging lower lip.

Spurr wheeled and dropped to a knee, raising the rifle against his cheek, frowning into the darkness relieved by the intermittent flashes. If young Brine was here, the others in Brine's gang—which included his two brothers, a cousin, an uncle, a sister, and his stout, wild-assed mother, LaMona Gatling—could be, as well.

No, that was unlikely. The others had probably gone back to their hideout on up the trail. They'd likely sent Brine, the youngest of the ragtag bunch, each as deadly as he was crazy, back to scout the trail. They'd probably sensed that Spurr and three other deputy United States marshals had been shadowing them since their last army payroll holdup on the Deadwood-Yankton Freight Road up in Dakota two weeks ago.

During another lightning flash, Spurr leaned over young Brine once more. The kid's eyes, mean and owly even in death, were half open as they regarded Spurr with a perpetual scowl.

“Joke's on you, you son of a bitch,” Spurr said as he started to make his way back through the trees, ducking under and winding around branches, deadfalls snapping wetly under his high-topped Indian moccasins, which were easier on an old man's feet than cowhide.

As he began tramping up the muddy trail after Cochise, the drizzle pelting his hat and his yellow india rubber poncho, he couldn't help feeling a smug satisfaction. The three other lawmen he'd been riding with—all young enough to be his sons, even his
grandsons
—had ridden on down Henry's Hollow toward Red Creek, because that's the trail that ole LaMona Gatling had led them to believe she'd taken.

Spurr had known better though he'd had to admit that the old outlaw queen and distant cousin to Jesse James had done a good job of making it
look
like Red Creek was where she'd headed, taking the right tine where the trail had forked about three miles back. But Spurr's sixth sense, honed by nearly twenty years of hunting owlhoots for Uncle Sam and fighting in the Little Misunderstanding and the Indian Wars before that, had told him that the trail she'd wanted him and the others to follow was just too obvious.

Shit, she'd been doing a damn good job of covering her tracks all the way down from Dakota. Why would she suddenly get sloppy so close to her home territory?

Spurr had insisted, albeit with slight reservation, that she'd led her gang up the fork's left tine, to the northeast as opposed to the southeast.

The other three lawmen had chuckled at him, however. They'd rolled their eyes and glanced at each other the way the younger folks do when they think the older folks have bats in their belfry. Deputy Windom Mitchell—nephew of the governor of Dakota Territory—had suggested that Spurr follow the trail he thought LaMona had taken.

“Go on up and check it out, Spurr. We'll say hidy to LaMona for you at Red Creek!”

Mitchell had grinned sneeringly. He'd cut his brash young eyes to the others, and they'd all laughed and shook their heads at how far the old, once-respected lawdog, Spurr Morgan, had tumbled in his old age. And they'd whipped their horses up the trail angling off through the creek bottom to the south, their horses' hooves kicking up gouts of mud behind them.

So Spurr had followed the northeast trail. And somewhere ahead of him lay LaMona's hideout—one of many that peppered the Nations between the Platte and Red Rivers. That was an even safer bet now that he'd run into young Brine acting as scout. No reason for the young killer to scout a cold trail.

It took him a while to find Cochise. The horse had run a hundred yards up trail and found a little hollow off the north side, and a patch of thick, green bromegrass and a pool of fresh rainwater.

Spurr, whose ticker was a colicky iron crab in his chest, was out of breath and footsore by the time he caught up with the horse, and slid his Winchester into his beaded elk-hide saddle boot. He didn't remember the long gun feeling as heavy as it was starting to feel these days. Over the past couple of years, actually. He was in his early sixties, after all, pushing on nigh to the end, he supposed.

If he was going to die, he'd just as soon die out here on the owlhoot trail. Lord knew the law still needed him, with his boss, Chief Marshal Henry Brackett, hiring men like the governor's nephew and the other two wet-behind-the-ears city boys—Wagner and Pritchett.

Spurr heaved his tired old bones into the saddle and rode ahead slowly, Cochise's hooves splashing through puddles and making squishing sounds in the mud. He kept a careful eye out for more scouts and LaMona's cabin. He didn't want to ride unwittingly into her lair. LaMona was part Comanche, part Cherokee, with some Irish and Norwegian thrown in to make one crazy roaring bitch, and she was known to have slow-roasted a few federal boys in clay pots over small fires while she and her kin danced jigs to her screeching fiddle around the dying lawmen.

Spurr felt his oysters crawl up tight against his crotch as he considered such a miserable end.

When he'd ridden another fifteen minutes, a dull, red light shone in the darkness ahead. It was so faint that it could have been the glowing coal of a cigarette, but it was a steady umber light. Not a firelight, either. It was most likely a window light.

As Spurr continued riding, he reached forward of his right thigh and slid his old repeater from its beaded sheath, and held the barrel across his saddlebows. The light grew slowly until he could see the silhouette of a small cabin through the inky black forest.

When he spied a path rising from the trail and along the shoulder of a bluff on his left, he put Cochise up the slope, hoping the trace would take him to a spot above the cabin where he could reconnoiter the situation from a safe distance.

It did.

In scattered oaks and cottonwoods, he dismounted, led Cochise down the far side of the slope from the cabin, whose lights shone down off the bluff's southern side, and tied the horse to some wild plum branches. He removed his spurs and dropped them into a saddlebag pouch, so he wouldn't rattle when he walked.

Returning to the crest of the slope, he hunkered down behind a low limestone shelf. He grunted and cursed his age as he tried to position himself on the cold, damp ground in such a way that he didn't feel he was pushing railroad spikes through his hips, knees, and shoulders, and he didn't feel as though his ribs were poking through his guts.

Christ, he was old.

He was beginning to wonder, along with Chief Marshal Brackett and the young deputies he'd outsmarted and everyone else in his sphere, why in hell he didn't retire. He knew some full-hipped old gals he could marry and haul back to his cabin in the shadow of Mount Rosalie. They would no doubt keep his natural male cravings properly satisfied, his feet warm on cold winter nights, bring him summer-night toddies out on the stoop, and even tend a kitchen garden to keep him in canned vegetables through the snowy Colorado winter.

The idle thoughts of a trail-weary old man . . .

When he'd found a relatively comfortable position, he lifted the field glasses to stare down through the brush and tree toward the cabin. He couldn't see much because of the darkness—only what appeared a hollow with a hovel of some kind in it. There were five lighted windows in the place, all obscured by curtains.

Occasional shadows slid around behind those gauzy red or blue curtains.

Spurr lowered the field glasses, ran a hand down his warty face, scrubbed his gray-brown patch beard with gloved fingers, and considered the situation.

When those lights went out, he'd make his move.

And the devil take the hindmost . . .

He closed his eyes. His chin felt suddenly as heavy as an anvil. He lifted it, blinked, and chastised himself.

You can't sleep now, old man. You got a job of work to do before you turn in.

But then suddenly he felt the warm sun on his cheek, and as he lifted his chin from his gloved hands splayed on the ground before him, he realized it was morning and that what had awakened him was a woman's throaty voice singing off-key the old funeral hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”