The Old Wolves (4 page)

SIX

Two weeks later, Spurr splashed whiskey into a tin cup and threw it back.

He sighed, smacked his lips, and set the cup on the crude table he'd fashioned from a pine stump beside the bed in his two-room cabin on the slopes of Mount Rosalie. He lay his head back against his pillow and stared toward the front of the shack filled with brown shadows.

It had been a warm day, and he'd propped his plank door open with a rock. Now the air was stitched with an autumnal chill. The light angling through it and through the low, sashed windows on each side of it, was touched with late-afternoon gold and speckled with dust motes.

Night would be here soon. Spurr had gotten out of bed once to scrounge up a sandwich to go with the whiskey he'd been sipping since dawn, and once more to prop the door open with the rock.

Outside, the dog who hung around the place started barking angrily. The sounds were harsh after an entire day filled with the peace and quiet of the bluffs and foothills rising toward the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and the vaulting, cobalt-blue, high-altitude sky. A long, quiet day now interrupted near its end by the barking of that damn dog whom Spurr called simply Dawg and who'd come out of nowhere and stayed around the place even when Spurr wasn't here, which was damn near all the time, though that would likely change now.

If they were going to cohabitate indefinitely, Spurr and Dawg needed to come to terms.

“Goddamnit, Dawg, shut your consarned mouth and go rustle up a porky-pine!”

The dog's barks did not dwindle in the least. In fact, they grew even more frantic. And then Spurr realized why as his sharp ears picked up the ominous ratcheting hiss of a rattlesnake.

“Ah, shit.”

Spurr flung his single sheet back and dropped his stocking-clad feet to the floor. He rose with a heavy groan, feeling his ticker lurch in his chest, and then, clad in only the socks and his threadbare longhandles, shuffled over to his cluttered eating table. His Starr .44 sat on the table, beside a tin plate from which Dawg had earlier removed Spurr's steak bone from last night and chewed it, growling and whining his satisfaction, on the front stoop.

Spurr grabbed the .44, spun the cylinder, and shuffled out onto the stoop and stood over the grease spot that was all that remained of the bone.

The dog was running in circles about thirty feet out from the stoop, in the yard that was large patches of clay-colored dirt between yucca and mountain sage plants. In the middle of the dog's rotation, and the focus of its attention, was a coiled diamondback that was striking repeatedly while the dog, well accustomed to the perils of the wild, leapt back just out of the serpent's reach.

The dog—a black-and-brown shepherd mongrel with one shredded ear—had its hackles raised and was showing its teeth from which dripped the stringy foam of its wrath.

“Get the hell out of the way, and I'll shoot the son of a bitch!” Spurr shouted, stepping forward, blinking and pinching sleep out of his eyes. “Been needin' meat for the stewpot anyways, and that damn viper nearly bit me two days ago when I was fetchin' firewood. Get out of the way, you fool cur!”

Spurr clicked the Starr's hammer back. He waited for the snake to strike at Dawg once more, and to draw its head back to its coil, and fired.

Dawg yelped and twisted around to look back at Spurr as the lawman's slug plumed dust about six feet beyond the snake. The report took the starch out of the cur's tail; it slunk about four feet back away from the snake. Not yet ready to let the serpent go despite the fool on the porch with the pistol, the dog lay belly down as it stared in dark frustration at the snake, whining deep in its shaggy chest.

The snake lifted its flat, diamond-shaped head, slithering its forked tongue. Its copper eyes, with all the expression of steel pellets, turned toward the cur hunkered before it. Spurr's Starr roared, and the head disappeared, leaving only a red, ragged end where the .44-caliber round had cleaved it from the body, thick as Spurr's bony wrist.

Even with its head gone, the snake tried to strike. The dog, horrified, leapt back with a yip and then, as the snake continued to writhe and whip its button tail, the dog stood about six feet away from it, shuttling its skeptical eyes from the viper to Spurr and back again.

Spurr stared at the snake in wide-eyed surprise at the shot he'd just made. “Shit,” he said, looking at the smoking gun in his hand. “Did you see that, Dawg? That was one dog-gone good shot, wouldn't you say, boy?”

The dog mewled deep in its chest, regarded Spurr with one ear down, the shredded one half raised, tipped its head to one side, and then turned and slunk off for a pile of boulders sheathed in high, blond weeds and cedars, where it usually hunted for cottontails.

Spurr chuckled, still amazed—“I haven't made a shot like that in years!”—and walked down off the porch steps and into the yard. He ambled over to the snake that was still writhing wildly though its movements were gradually diminishing, and held the beast down with one of his stocking feet. He grabbed the viper just down from the ragged neck and held it up for inspection.

“That's a hog there!” he said, estimating the length to be around five and a half feet. “Throw him in a stew pot with some onions and pinto beans, and I'm gonna have me a meal!”

He'd started walking back toward the cabin, the snake still slowly coiling and uncoiling in his hand, when a clattering rose behind him.

He turned toward the west, where he could see, between a haystack butte and a rocky dike, the town of Denver spread out across the eastern plain about ten miles away. It didn't look so big from here and this high vantage—just a rather motley collection of red and black or brown buildings and stock pens surrounding a business section a little larger and more sprawling than Dodge City's or Wichita's, with the English castle–like Union Station standing watch over the silver rails of the Union Pacific, formerly the Denver Pacific, and a few other lines that were converging now on Denver and making it a right smart hub.

Heading from the direction of town, now just visible as it climbed the incline from the plains and was turning around a rocky-topped butte, was a spiffy-looking two-seater buggy upholstered in black leather and appointed with high, red wheels.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Spurr said, narrowing his eyes speculatively, as he watched the buggy come along the shaggy, two-track trail angling like a long, flour-white snake through the pinyons and junipers and shin-high brome and needle grass spotted with the soft pinks and velvet blues of autumn wildflowers.

One man was driving the one-horse rig while another lounged in the seat behind him, to the buggy's far right side, holding a newspaper open before him. Spurr couldn't see much of the buggy's passenger except for a pearl-gray derby hat, but he recognized the driver, and that alone—as well as the fancy buggy—told him who was on his way for a visit. The driver was Chief Marshal Henry Brackett's first assistant, Leonard Foghorn, a graduate of Yale University and a member of some moneyed clan from the same rolling, green Maryland hills that the chief marshal himself hailed from.

When a fellow saw Leonard Foghorn—a well set-up lad in his early twenties and always dressed to the nines in a crisp, carefully tailored seersucker suit—you knew the Chief Marshal wasn't far behind. Henry Brackett wasn't now, either—only about three feet away from his blond, pink-cheeked assistant, reading the
Rocky Mountain News
while the buggy jostled him along the uneven two-track.

“Well, this has got to be bad—real bad,” Spurr said after young Leonard had turned a broad circle in the yard and pulled the buggy sideways in front of Spurr, dust wafting in the salmon light. “I think in all the years we've worked together, Henry, you've been out here only once. On a huntin' trip.”

Long ago, Spurr and the chief marshal had dispensed with formalities. They each addressed the other by his first name. Brackett was only two years older than Spurr, after all, and they'd worked together as deputies before Henry had been promoted to the chief marshal position about fifteen years before, when he was still a relatively young man. At least, younger than the old man he was now.

“Good Lord, man,” Brackett said, scowling as his watery blue eyes raked Spurr up and down, grimacing as he gave the same scrutiny to the still-writhing snake in Spurr's hand. “You look as though you're just getting up!”

“Officially, I'm still in bed.
Un
officially I got out of bed to see what Dawg was barkin' about and just sort of
accidentally
filled the stewpot. You should have seen me, Henry. Cleaved this serpent's head clean off with my second shot!”

“Looks delicious,” said Leonard Foghorn, who looked a little like a rawboned, clear-eyed farmboy from the Midwest, but one with prissy habits, like flicking his kid gloves held in one hand at blackflies buzzing around his yellow-blond curls.

“I'd invite you for supper, Leonard,” Spurr said, “but I haven't tidied up around the place in a month of Sundays. The last woman who lived out here left . . . oh, nigh on fifteen, sixteen years ago, now. Just me an' Dawg and a skunk that lives under the porch out here, now.”

Leonard turned toward the cabin's sagging front stoop and worked his nostrils, sniffing. “Is that what that smell is?”

“Either that or coyote bitch that comes around to play with Dawg now an' then. I think she's smitten with him.”

“Spurr, are you going to invite me to step down?” Brackett asked, setting his folded newspaper aside and folding the bows on his silver-framed, pince-nez reading glasses, “or are you just going to keep jawing with that writhing viper in your hand?”

“All right, all right, Henry,” Spurr said, turning and ambling toward the cabin. “Come on in and get it over with. I know why you're here.”

Spurr went in and tossed the snake on his cutting table that was still bloody from the steak he'd carved last night from the side of beef hanging in his keeper shed. He grabbed an uncorked bottle and filled one of his several dirty tin cups on his four-by-four-foot eating table.

Brackett tramped up the porch steps. Leonard Foghorn remained in the buggy, leaning back in the leather seat and scowling down at Dawg, who was skinning a rabbit in the dirt near the buggy's front wheel.

Brackett stopped in the cabin's open doorway and doffed his pearl-gray derby that complemented his matching vest, white silk shirt, and black split-tail frock coat and trousers with gray pinstripes. A natty dresser, Henry was, though Spurr had always thought he'd looked more at home in the rugged, smoke– and sweat-stained trail gear that Spurr had always felt most comfortable in himself. Brackett's pince-nez glasses dangled from his coat lapel to which they were attached by a black celluloid rosette and a length of black ribbon.

He was a small, wiry man with a craggy, ruddy, handsome face, the skin drawn taut against the fine, almost delicate bones. His close-cropped hair was snow white, though his brows remained dark brown. He watched, slightly stoop-shouldered, as Spurr filled the tin cup clear to its brim with whiskey.

“That won't bring her back, you know,” Henry said and hooked his derby hat over the back of the chair at the end of the table nearest the door.

Spurr looked into the cup as he raised it to his lips, gave a little, caustic chuff, and took a swig. When he pulled the cup back down with a sigh, he felt a soothing flush rise in his cheeks and leach up into his brain. “Any sign of those killers, Henry?”

“No. We think they rode out of town a ways and then circled back later that night. They might have hopped an eastbound train for Kansas. I have my two of my best men on it.”

“Why, thank you, Henry,” Spurr said ironically though he knew the insult hadn't been intentional.

“Ah, shit.” Brackett pulled out a chair and sat down, his back facing the wall and the front window left of the open door.

When he'd eased his wiry, compact frame into the chair, Spurr slid the bottle toward him. “Drink?”

“Will I go blind?”

“I make no promises,” Spurr said as he retrieved a relatively clean cup from a shelf over his grease-splattered range. He set the cup on the table. As Brackett splashed a conservative measure of the busthead into it, Spurr sagged down in a chair across from him.

Neither said anything for a time. As if in acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation, Brackett hauled an old, soiled canvas makings sack out of his coat pocket and began to slowly, methodically build a quirley.

Spurr had to smile at that. Brackett had made it to the rank of chief marshal, probably hauled in six or seven thousand dollars a year, lived in a nice, tight brick and gingerbread house near Cherry Creek with a nice, smiling little gray-haired woman, and yet he still rolled his own cigarettes. No ready-made smokes for Henry Brackett.

When he'd deftly closed the cylinder and rolled it between his lips to seal it, he plucked a stove match off the table, scraped it to life on the base of Spurr's tarnished brass table lamp, and touched the flame to the quirley.