The Old Wolves (5 page)

Squinting through the smoke billowing around his head, Henry cleared his throat and said, “Spurr, you're officially retired.”

Spurr sat back in his chair and considered the words. They were no surprise. He'd been expecting them. Yet, they still rankled.

“The girl wasn't your fault,” Henry added when he'd tossed back nearly his entire shot of whiskey and set the cup back down on the table. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one blames you for that.”

“Well, thank you, Henry, but the bullet she took
was
meant for me. And she was a hell of a nice girl though I admit I'm partial to doxies.”

“I just wanted you to know that that in no way has this figured into your . . . uh . . . mandatory retirement.”

“Good to know, but that won't bring her back, neither,” Spurr said, splashing more whiskey into his old friend's cup.

Brackett waved a veiny, brown hand in halfhearted reproach, but he lifted the cup and took another sip. He set the cup down and took a pull from his quirley as he once again squinted through the smoke at Spurr.

The chief marshal's eyes were a little rheumy, and Spurr idly wondered if it was from the whiskey or emotion, or, possibly, both. They'd come a long way together, and in a way both men were staring out from atop the same steep precipice.

“If you yourself don't know when it's time to hang up the shootin' irons,” Henry said, his ruddy cheeks reddening, “then it's come down to me to do it for you, thank you very much, you mule-headed son of a bitch!”

“Henry?”

“What?”

“One more.”

Brackett scowled at him. He took another drag from his quirley. “One more what?”

“One more job.” Spurr leaned forward on his elbows, staring at his old friend gravely. “Don't make me go out like this, with a dead innocent girl the last thing I got to remember before they nail the lid down on top of me. After all these long years of good service. I want to go out on a better note than that. I want to go out doing something right—however small the job. When I head for Mexico, I want to take that with me to mull over for the time I have left.” He sat back in his chair. “Hell, it's all I'm gonna have to live on.”

“You haven't saved anything?”

Spurr shook his head. “I always figured I'd die in some ravine somewhere down in Arizona or out Utah way, and it wouldn't matter.”

Brackett snored, chuckled without humor. “After all these years, you have nothing to live on. It all went for whiskey and whores.”

“Well, shit, I always believed in livin' till you're dead.”

“And now you're gonna starve down in Mexico in your old age.”

“With my head propped on a senorita's tender breast, Henry,” Spurr said, grinning over the rim of his whiskey cup.

Brackett snorted, shook his head.

“One more,” Spurr said, his voice thickly serious again. “Just one more. Anything. But not courtroom duty, fer chrissakes. I wanna finish up on the trail—me an' Cochise.”

Brackett drew a ragged breath. He studied Spurr for a time, and then he turned his head toward the door and yelled, “Leonard, bring my valise!”

SEVEN

Aboard the Union Pacific flyer headed north toward Cheyenne, Spurr closed the file on his lap, sat back in the green plush seat, and reached inside his elk-skin vest for a long, black cigar.

He bit the twist off the panatela and scraped his thumbnail over a stove match, lighting up. When he had the slender cheroot drawing properly, sucking the sweet-peppery smoke deep into his lungs, he lowered the cigar and absently studied its coal though it was not the panatela he was thinking about but the assignment he'd just read in the file Henry had given him.

The chief marshal had sent one old man after another one. An old man waiting in a constable's jail in some remote mountain village called Diamond Fire.

Well, that was fitting. The prisoner written about in the file was only two years younger than Spurr. George Blackleg was wanted on an old federal warrant for robbing a mail train six years ago in Kansas. A bounty hunter had picked up the old gent in a whorehouse up in a little mining town in the Medicine Bow Mountains and run him into the local lockup to claim his reward.

Whether the bounty hunter just had a good memory or had recently seen one of the old federal wanted dodgers—they often hung in post offices, barbershops, and Wells Fargo offices for years—Henry didn't know. All he did know was that he had an old man to pick up in the Medicine Bow Mountains, a hundred miles as the crow flies from Denver, and he didn't want to waste his younger, busier deputy marshals on such a tedious, routine assignment.

Henry hadn't put it just that way to Spurr, of course. He'd much less crassly told his senior-most deputy that he might have one more job for him though it included more horsebacking in the mountains west of Camp Collins, in northern Colorado, than actual lawdogging. Which made it appropriate for Spurr's last assignment, given the old deputy's bad health. So if Spurr wanted it, Henry supposed he could take it.

Spurr had taken it, pleased to have one last job beyond the one in which he'd gotten a pretty girl killed.

One last slow, easy job with which to ride off into eternity . . .

Spurr chuckled now as he looked out the train window at the Front Range of the Rockies sliding past, beyond the rolling blond prairie under the vast, cerulean, high-altitude sky. For some reason it had just dawned on him that Henry had ridden out to his cabin with every intention of giving Spurr the easy job of hauling old George Blackleg back to the federal courthouse in Denver. Henry hadn't let on, and he'd done a good job of fooling Spurr into believing he'd handed the job over reluctantly.

The truth of it was, Spurr now realized, Henry had packed that file in his valise with every intention of allowing his old friend to go out on a better note than he otherwise would have, so that the dead girl wouldn't be Spurr's last memory after twenty years of more or less exemplary service.

“I'll be damned,” Spurr said as he blew a long plume of aromatic tobacco smoke at the soot-streaked window.

“Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to watch your tongue—there is a young lady present!”

Spurr jerked with a start, and turned to see a stout woman in a gaudy traveling frock and feathered picture hat scowling down at him. She was a tall, blond woman with double jowls and angry little eyes, clutching a pink leather grip in one hand, a parasol in the other. She waved the parasol and made a face. “And would you mind opening a window and blowing that wretched smoke
out it
instead of merely
against it
and right back
into
our
faces
!”

Spurr frowned up at the big woman, who appeared in her late thirties, early forties. As far as he could tell, she was alone. Was
she herself
the “young lady” she'd been referring to? Spurr found himself grinning devilishly and asking wryly, “I'm sorry, ma'am, but I only see . . .”

A young girl's face rose up from behind the woman's right shoulder. Spurr's tired ticker lurched in his chest. The girl was pretty and brown-eyed, her thick, wavy, wheat-blond hair pulled back behind her head in a loose French braid—and for a moment Spurr saw Kansas City Jane staring at him from over the big woman's shoulder. For another moment, he thought that Jane was about to say something to him from the misty otherworld beyond this one.

But then the girl slid her curious, vaguely impatient eyes from Spurr to the big woman in front of her, and said in a needling voice totally unlike Jane's, “Can I have the window seat, Aunt Alice? You know how awful sick I get if I can't see out!”

“Only if you think you can stomach the smoke, dear?” The old woman glowered at Spurr. “We left the last car because of the cacophony kicked up by three drunkards. Here, we have to tolerate the smoke from your cigar!”

“Here, here—I'm opening the damn window, so get your frillies out of a twist!” Spurr said.

The woman gasped.

Spurr glanced over his shoulder, sheepish. The girl was scowling over her aunt's shoulder. “Uh . . . do pardon my French, ladies,” he said, lowering the window halfway and then stepping back against his own seat, remaining standing and giving a gentlemanly bow to the ladies.

The young girl, dressed in a plaid dress with a delicate little bow tie and bullet-brimmed straw hat with a brown silk band, wriggled her way around her portly aunt and sagged into the chair directly across from Spurr. The big woman then sort of half-tumbled and half-folded herself down into the seat beside her niece, and Spurr slacked back down into his own seat.

He took another drag from the cigar and made a point of blowing the smoke out the window. Still, both the girl and the big woman scowled at him, the big woman making a face and waving her hand though Spurr couldn't see any smoke blowing at her.

“I do apologize,” Spurr growled and, knowing he could no longer enjoy the panatela, carefully raked the coal off the end and onto the floor and stuffed the remaining cigar back into his shirt pocket for later.

He ground the coal beneath his moccasin boot. Both the girl and the big woman regarded him like an unsightly something a cur had left on the parlor rug. Spurr smiled at them and, since they were all sitting here together in the rocking, rattling parlor car, heading north across the vast, lonely plain, he tried to make conversation.

“You ladies headed far?”

The girl turned to the woman and arched a brow. The woman touched the girl's wrist, wagged her head not to speak to the unwashed stranger, and snootily directed her gaze out the window. The girl shuttled her own gaze past Spurr and out the window, and Spurr gave a snort, wishing he'd gone ahead and kept his panatela lit.

Uppity bitches.

He sighed, sagged down in his seat, and pulled his hat brim down low on his forehead. Might as well catch a catnap or two before detraining at the little station east of Camp Collins. His mind stayed with the women, however. He couldn't help feeling a little injured by their rude dismissal.

He opened one eye, furtively looking out from beneath his down-canted hat brim at the girl sitting across from him, her head turned toward the blond prairie sliding by, beyond the smoke lacing back from the locomotive. A pretty, young thing, this girl. Prettier than young Jane if you only took surface features into account, but Jane was far more lovely because of the tenderness in her eyes. Jane had had a hard life, and it had softened her heart, whereas this girl had lived a pampered life, and she had little time for anyone but herself.

Spurr tried to shunt his mind onto a different track than the one Jane was on. She was dead, and there was no bringing her back. As he turned his mind to other pursuits, he opened one eye again to regard the pretty girl sitting across from him once more.

He found himself remembering a time—years ago, of course—when he'd raised a flush in the cheeks of such a girl as the one sitting across from him. When such a girl would respond to him shyly, maybe bat an eyelash or two, and indulge him in demure conversation.

He remembered taking walks along country creeks with such a girl as this one, walks down country lanes, of picnicking with such a girl in the hills above his father's farm in Kansas, before he'd lit out west to make a new, wild life for himself.

Well, he'd had that life. Used it all up. He'd burned the fuse from both ends, and here he was in warty old age, sitting across from a pretty girl who wouldn't even look at him let alone indulge his conversation.

He was old enough to be the girl's grandfather, of course. The unkind fat woman sitting beside her was young enough to be Spurr's daughter. And neither one had the time of day for such a man as the one he'd become—old and used up and ugly and now only fit to transport one prisoner nearly as old as he himself was down the mountains to Denver for trial.

And then that was it.

His job was over. And since his job had been his life, what could possibly be left?

The girl turned to him. Her eyes met his. A pink flush rose in her cheeks.

Well, he'd be damned . . .

And then she turned to the older woman and rolled her eyes at Spurr. Spurr, deep in thought, had forgotten he'd been staring at the girl from beneath his hat brim. He'd apparently offended the girl.

The woman turned to him, beetling her blond brows over her deep-set eyes, and said, “Sir, please—a gentleman would not stare!”

“One,” Spurr said, straightening in his seat, “I ain't no gentleman. And two, neither one of you is anything like no lady should be.” He heaved his creaky bones to his feet and adjusted his cartridge belt and holstered .44 on his lean hips. “So there. Stick that in your pipe an' smoke it. Me . . .” He reached into the overhead rack for his saddlebags and his Winchester. “I'm gonna go out to the vestibule and smoke my friggin' cigar. I hope you
ladies
don't get too lonely without me.”

“Well, I never!” said the older, fat woman.

“Don't doubt it a bit,” Spurr said as, his saddlebags draped over his left shoulder, the Winchester in his right hand, he pinched his hat brim to the pair and headed on out the coach's rear door.

In the vestibule between the cars, he sat down with his back to the wall of the car he'd left, his saddlebags on one side of him, his rifle resting across his thighs, and relit the cheroot.

The air whooshed past him on both sides of the gap between the cars, dragging smoke from the locomotive along with it. Spurr stared out across the prairie to the purple mountains, smoking and thinking over the long years behind him—long years that had rushed past faster than the prairie sliding past him toward Denver now—and he was glad when the train came to a jerking halt at the water stop and the little station hut on the open prairie east of Camp Collins.

While the locomotive took on water and the conductor and one of the brakemen smoked and talked with the old black man who ran the depot hut in the shade of the hut's little brush arbor, Spurr led Cochise down the wooden ramp from the stable car and tightened the roan's saddle cinch.

“Where you off to this time, Spurr?”

The old lawman turned to see the old black man, Sebastian Polly, walk toward him from the station hut, puffing the quirley he held between his lips with a gnarled, arthritic right hand. The sideburns running down from the blue uniform cap were steel-colored, as was Polly's thick mustache, with only a few threads of black showing through the gray.

“You mean, for the
last
time, Sebastian,” Spurr said. For as long as Spurr had been a federal badge toter, Sebastian Polly had been living out here on this backside of nowhere east of Camp Collins, sixty miles south of Cheyenne.

Polly lived in the station hut, and Spurr couldn't remember ever stopping at this point and not seeing the black man here, tending the hut that saw business only when the train stopped to take on water or to let a passenger off. There had been a stage line through here, years ago, and Polly had run the relay station, but of course the stage line had closed when the Union Pacific connected Denver with the Northern Pacific line at Cheyenne. That's when Polly went to work for the railroad and moved into the depot hut.

Over the years, the black man's hair had gradually turned grayer, and he'd grown a little thinner, his molasses eyes a little rheumier, his shoulders clad in the age-coppered blue uniform coat a little more stooped.

“What you talkin' about, Spurr?” Polly said, blowing out a plume of cigarette smoke and knitting his grizzled brows together.

“This is it for me.” Spurr slipped Cochise's bridle bit through the horse's teeth and then grabbed his rifle from where it leaned against the wooden loading ramp slanting down from the stable car. “Last job. I done been retired.”

“You don't say!”

“I said it.”

Spurr slid his rifle into his beaded elk-hide scabbard and then tossed his saddlebags over Cochise's back, tucking them under his bedroll around which his heavy buckskin mackinaw was tied, to hold the bags in place. He'd soon be climbing into high, cold, rough country.