Dark Trail
Authors: Ed Gorman
DARK TRAIL
DARK TRAIL
ED GORMAN
M. EVANS
Lanham
â¢
Boulder
â¢
New York
â¢
Toronto
â¢
Plymouth
,
UK
Published by M. Evans
An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Distributed by National Book Network
Copyright © 1990 by Ed Gorman
First paperback edition 2014
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:
Gorman, Edward
Dark trail / Ed Gorman.
p. cm.â(An Evans novel of the West)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3557.0759D3Â Â Â Â 1990Â Â Â Â 90-27628
813'. 54âdc20
ISBN: 978-1-59077-231-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-59077-232-4 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesâPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Peter Rabe:
peace, my friend
Chapter One
The cigarette had two or three good drags left and Leo Guild was happy to take them. A couple of minutes from now he was going to go bursting into the little frame farmhouse standing silver and shabby in the moonlight ten yards ahead of him. Probably there was at least one man in there guarding the prisoner with a shotgun. These might be the last drags of a cigarette Guild ever had in his life.
“You scared, Leo?” The woman who asked this stood behind the same elm tree as Guild.
“I suppose.”
“That means you are.”
“I am. Yes.”
“You don't have to do it.”
Guild took the cigarette from his lips and exhaled. He was a tall man with white hair, a black Stetson, a black suit coat, boiled white shirt, gray serge trousers, and black Texas boots. A .44 was strapped around his waist.
He smiled. “Nah, I don't have to do it, do I?”
“Don't go and get sarcastic on me, Leo.”
“I could just walk back to my horse and ride out of here and you wouldn't care at all, would you, Sarah?”
“Nothin' bothers me as much as sarcasm. You know that, Leo.”
Guild looked at her: the red hair, the soft pretty face, the slight but graceful body in the blue gingham dress. She wasn't exactly city but she wasn't exactly country, either. She was some fetching combination of both.
“By rights,” Guild said, “I should shoot him myself when I get in there.”
“It wasn't his fault, Leo. It was mine.”
“You always say that.”
“He wasn't the one who left you, Leo. I was.”
“I didn't hear him offer to return you.”
“First of all, I'm not anybody's property, Leo. And second of allâ” She sighed, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “Second of all, I fell in love with Frank, Leo. I just couldn't help it.”
“Leaving me for a gunfighter sure doesn't make any sense to me, Sarah.” His words were tinged with anger and pain.
Now she smiled. He remembered her when she was a teenager, smiling that way. he felt things he didn't want to feel. âThat's one thing I've noticed about being thirty-five.”
“What's that?”
“Almost nothing makes sense. Least of all marrying a gunfighter, I suppose.” She looked at the farmhouse and smiled. “He's the little boy I never had, Leo.”
Guild was out of drags. No more stalling. He dropped the cigarette to the sandy dirt and stepped on it with the pointed toe of his boot. He stood for a minute looking around at the land. In the moonlight the flat farmland was all silver and shadow. On the tops of ripe autumn corn, dew shone like fire. A nighthawk glided past the round yellow moon. A barn owl hooted lonesomely. In the surrounding hills you could smell smoky October.
“Well,” Guild said, taking his .44 from his holster.
“You really don't have to do this, Leo.”
He looked at her and smiled again. “Right,” he said.
Guild crouched down and went through the long buffalo grass up to the front porch. He moved leftward, still crouching, gun ready.
Behind the lacy white curtains in the front window, he could see Sarah's husband Frank tied to a straight-backed chair. He was carrying on a conversation with a fat man in a plaid shirt and dungarees that had slipped aways under his considerable belly. The man held a Remington repeater in his right hand though he wasn't ready to fire it. It was just sort of dangling there from one of the man's fingers. Frank was a sweet-talker, the bastard. Now he was sweet-talking one of the men who'd captured him.
Guild couldn't see anybody else inside. He moved around the side of the house to check the horses in back. Two mounts, one a roan, the other a dun. The roan was slapping hard at flies with his tail. Given the two horses, it was clear that it was just Frank and the fat guy inside.
Guild went back around to the front of the house. Frank and the other guy were still talking. In fact, the other guy was grinning, as if Frank had just told him a funny story. That goddamn Frank. He'd always driven Guild crazy.
Guild crept up on the porch, paused, lifted up his leg, kicked in the door, and went in firing.
The air was loud with bullets ripping into the parlor wall and hazy with the choking clouds of gunsmoke.
The fat guy thought about lifting up his Remington but Guild walked right over to him and put the .44 against his forehead.
“Please,” Guild said. “I don't have anything against you and I really don't want to hurt you. You understand?”
The fat guy nodded.
“I'll be a son of a bitch,” Frank Evans said.
“Untie him,” Guild said to the fat guy.
“I'll be a son of a bitch.”
“Now,” Guild said to the man who looked dazed by all that had happened in the last minute.
The fat guy went over and untied Frank.
Guild looked around. There was a plump black stove in the archÂway between parlor and kitchen, new rose paper on the walls, and two wire chairs and a settee in the east corner. This was a working man's dream, cheap but new and clean.
“Your place?” Guild asked the fat guy as he untied Frank.
The fat guy, finishing, nodded.
“Tell your wife she did a good job,” Guild said.
The fat guy looked at him and shrugged. “Guess she'd probably appreciate that.”
Frank stood up, rubbing his wrists. “I'll be sure and tell Mr. Ingram you did a good job, Karl. Goddamned near cut off my circulation.”
At that, Karl kind of grinned. Then he obviously remembered what had just happened here. “He's going to be pissed.”
“I imagine so,” Frank said, collecting his gun, hat, and coat from the settee. Frank Evans was short, dark, handsome in a way that was not quite pretty, and moved with a gracefulness some men found suspicious.
Frank nodded at the front door. “Sarah out there?”
“Yes.”
“You hold him here while I go talk to her. I got a few things I need to say. All right?”
Guild looked at him. He'd never liked the little bastard. Never. “You giving me any choice?”
“Don't go getting that way, Leo, for Christ's sake,” Frank said.
And with that, he was gone.
Guild and Karl stood in an awkward silence. “Sears, Roebuck.”
“Pardon?” Guild said.
“Sears, Roebuck. That's where the missus got the furniture and stuff.”
“Oh.”
“I'll tell her what you said.”
“Be sure to.”
Karl kept staring at the .44 Guild held on him. “You his partner?”
“Frank's?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Frank doesn't have a partner.”
“Didn't think so. How you know him then?”
Guild looked at Karl, relishing the expression that he was about to put on Karl's face. “He stole my wife,” Guild said.
Karl looked at him and whistled. “He makes a lot of people mad, don't he?”
“He sure does.”
“That's why Mr. Ingram brought him out here and tied him up. He killed Mr. Ingram's brother in a gunfight.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. Mr. Ingram's brother was a snake.”
“Oh.”
“But Mr. Ingram's going to be pissed he didn't get a chance to kill Frank.”
Guild laughed. “So are a lot of people.”
Five Years Later
It was a river town of new brick buildings and buggies, saloons and honky-tonk pianos, and pretty women in bustles and big picture hats and men in the latest Edwardian fashions stepping proudly down the dusty board sidewalks. In their minds they probably dreamed that this was Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Tyler Street in Kansas City.
Guild had been in town three weeks, living in a rooming house set beneath the sprawl of a vast tree aflame with color now that the temperature had cooled. Plump orange pumpkins had been set out on porches for Halloween a week hence.
Guild had just finished two months of guarding ore wagons up in the mountains. There had been labor union trouble, and while Guild was sympathetic to the workers, they could be just as hard-ass as the mine owners. During this time he had developed a cough. That cough was still with him as he lay awake at the breakfast hour listening to the chatter of kids in the street below, headed noisily for school.