The Rustler (14 page)

“You mustn't tell anyone,” Sarah whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “Not Rowdy, and certainly not Sam O'Ballivan.” She paused, drew a shaky breath, let it out again. “Do you promise?”

“Depends,” Wyatt said, “on just what sort of secret this turns out to be.”

“M-my father suffers from spells. Times when he gets mixed up, can't remember things. So I do his work for him, whenever I can. If Charles and the other stockholders find out—well…we could lose everything—”

Wyatt sighed again. “Sarah, Langstreet suspects something. That's why he came to Stone Creek, though the boy plays some part in it, too. You're on borrowed time until he gets back.”

Sarah let her forehead rest against Wyatt's strong chest.

He held her, brushed a light kiss onto her temple.

“Will you help me?” she asked softly.

His arms tightened around her. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

W
ILL YOU HELP ME
?

Wyatt wondered how long it had been since Sarah Tamlin had uttered those words—to anybody. That she'd said them to him was a peculiar honor, considering the extent of her pride.

He'd said yes.

Now, he thought, as he held her front gate open so she could pass ahead of him, all he had to do was figure out
how
he'd go about keeping his word.

As they'd walked to her house she'd confessed that she'd made some bad loans and replaced the funds with her own and her father's money. While that wasn't illegal, at least as far as Wyatt knew, she and Ephriam could end up as paupers if Langstreet and the other stockholders caught on. The first thing they'd do, once they learned about Ephriam's “spells,” would be to show him the road. With no salary coming in things would get tight around the Tamlin place, money-wise, and fast.

On the front porch, Sarah looked up at Wyatt with bleak vulnerability in her eyes—blue as bruises, they were—and he thought he saw the glimmer of tears. “You won't tell anyone?” she asked very softly. “About Papa, I mean? And me running the bank? And the loans?”

Wyatt sighed, holding his hat in one hand. “I can't promise you that, Sarah,” he said. She hadn't done anything wrong, to his way of thinking, but a lot of folks had entrusted her with what savings they could scrape together and lay by against hard times. “I need to think it over.”

She started to speak, stopped herself, nodded once.

He touched the smooth skin of her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She felt as soft as condensed moonlight. “I meant it when I said I'd stand by you,” he told her. “For now, for tonight, that has to be good enough.”

She sniffled, nodded again. “Good night, Wyatt.”

He leaned down, brushed his mouth against hers. “Good night,” he replied.

Behind them, toward the center of town, shots erupted. Six of them, rapid-fire.

“Damn!” Wyatt cursed, turning from Sarah, starting for the steps.

She caught hold of his arm, and he was surprised by the strength of her grip. She was a small woman, delicately made, but her fingers felt steely against his flesh.

Don't go,
her eyes said.

Gently, Wyatt patted her hand and then removed it from his arm. He turned, sprinted down the walk, and vaulted over the gate, not wanting to spare the time to open it.

More shots splintered the night.

As he ran for Main Street, Wyatt told himself it was just a few of the boys, whooping it up on payday, and he wouldn't have to shoot anybody, or get shot himself, but all the while he knew he was joshing himself.

There'd been a gunfight, directly in front of Jolene Bell's, and three men lay in the street, sprawled on their backs and bleeding, their arms flung out wide from their sides. The smell of gun smoke still tainted the air, though he figured the battle must have been over, because a dozen other men were riding out at top speed, and ordinary folks had begun to gather on the sidewalks.

Keeping the .45 at the ready in his right hand, Wyatt scanned the crowd, reached the first victim, crouched to put a hand to the pulse at the base of his throat, though he could see the man had been hit square in the center of the forehead. His eyes were wide-open, staring in affronted surprise at the starry sky.

There was no heartbeat.

Using two fingers on his left hand, Wyatt closed the man's eyes.

Doc Venable elbowed his way through from the sidewalk as Wyatt squatted beside the second man. Carl Justice gazed up at him, blood gurgling, a crimson fountain, through a wound in his throat. He was going to drown in the stuff.

“Doc!” Wyatt growled, knowing full well that there was no saving Carl.

Venable knelt opposite Wyatt, fumbling with his medical bag. “Turn him onto his side,” he said.

Wyatt did as he was told. How old was Carl, anyway? Seventeen? Twenty? Whatever age he was, he wasn't going to get any older, and sorrow ambushed Wyatt, surging up from somewhere in his middle. Carl was a rustler for sure, and he was probably guilty of other crimes, too, but he was hardly more than a kid. He might have turned around, if he'd gotten the choice.

“That third fella is a goner,” Doc said, when Wyatt moved to rise, pumping something into a syringe and looking for a place on Carl's blood-drenched body to stick the needle. “No need to bother with him.”

“What is that?” Wyatt asked, momentarily light-headed. Blood didn't bother him, but even the sight of a hypodermic needle made him woozy.

“Pure morphine,” Doc answered, in a gruff whisper. “There's no bringing this boy back, but it'll take him three or four minutes to die, and it doesn't have to be that way.”

Carl gave a strangled cry, and his blood wet the thighs of Doc Venable's pants. When the kid gave a violent shudder and went still, Wyatt got to his feet, surveyed the gathering on the sidewalk.

Folks were keeping to the shadows.

“Who shot these men?” he asked.

Nobody spoke, and nobody moved.

Wyatt waited, staring into every pair of eyes he could catch.

Finally, Kitty Steel stepped down off the sidewalk and approached.

“They shot each other,” she said.

“I took their guns,” Wyatt said. “How did they happen to be armed?”

“A man can always get a gun,” Kitty sighed, looking glumly down at the dead men at her feet. “They were arguing over a hand of cards. It got out of hand. They borrowed what pistols they could from the regulars in the saloon and came out here to settle up.”

Wyatt shoved a hand through his hair. He'd lost his hat, somewhere between Sarah's place and here. In the morning, he'd saddle Sugarfoot and ride out after the others. Chasing after a dozen men in the dark would be futile—best he could hope for was a bullet fired from behind a rock or a Joshua tree.

“Help me with these bodies,” Doc Venable ordered, addressing the gaping spectators on the sidewalk. “We'll lay them out in my office, bury 'em proper tomorrow.”

A few men shuffled forward, hesitant and shamefaced.

Wyatt crouched beside Carl again. “Is he dead?”

Doc nodded. “Facing his maker,” he said.

Bile scalded the back of Wyatt's throat. Because he'd ridden with Carl, though they certainly hadn't been friends, he hoisted the slight, inert form off the ground, draped it over one shoulder, and started for Doc's.

Sarah was already there. She tied on one of Doc's aprons and cleared space for the corpses and even filled some basins with hot water.

“You oughtn't to be here,” Wyatt said, when he saw her.

“Are any of them alive?” she asked.

Wyatt laid poor Carl on the examination table where Lonesome had rested, just that morning. “You shouldn't be here,” he said again.

“I always help Doc when things like this happen,” she told him, unruffled. She got a basin and a cloth and began to wash Carl's face as gently as if she thought he could feel the touch of her hands, and might feel more pain if she was rough.

“When Till Crosly damn near cut his foot off chopping wood,” Doc contributed, “Sarah helped me sew it back on.”

Wyatt felt queasy.

“Better look and see if they've got any kind of papers with their names on them,” Doc said. “Like as not, they have folks someplace.”

The second body was placed on the leather settee, the third on wooden chairs hastily scraped into a row.

Wyatt dug through blood-soaked pockets, but he found nothing but a bag of tobacco and an old watch with a picture of a pretty woman painted on the inside of the case. Searching Carl, Doc came up with a worn letter and handed it off to Wyatt.

“Probably from his mama,” Doc said.

Wyatt glanced at the return address, penned in a woman's fine and flowing hand.
Home,
was all it said. She'd sent the letter to Carl in care of general delivery, Denver. He tucked the envelope, smudged and much-handled, into the inside pocket of his vest. Said nothing.

“I'll get Willie to take pictures of them,” Doc said, as calmly as if things like this happened in Stone Creek every day of the week and twice on Sundays. “That way, if their kin should come looking for them, we'll know who's who.”

Wyatt gulped back more bile as Sarah dunked a bloody rag in the basin and wrung it out before wiping at Carl's face again. When the dead man's eyes popped open, she closed them matter-of-factly, and weighted them down with pennies from a little bowl on a nearby table.

Doc dismissed the bystanders, leaving himself and Sarah and Wyatt alone with the bodies.

Now that Sarah almost had his face wiped clean of blood, Carl looked more like his usual self—except, of course, for the pennies on his eyes.

“You going to wash all three of them down?” Wyatt asked, and then gulped again, and colored up. Decomposition hadn't begun, but the bodies stunk to high heaven, because bodies, when they die, discharge worse things than blood.

“Of course,” Sarah said. “We can't bury them like this.”

Wyatt's stomach did a slow, backward roll. “Why not? Who's going to see them, once the coffin lid is nailed on?”

“It's the decent thing to do,” Sarah replied, trying to pull off Carl's blood-sodden coat. Next, she'd be stripping him naked.

“I'm not sure I agree on the decency aspect,” Wyatt said.

Sarah surprised—and comforted—him with a sudden smile. “They're
dead,
Wyatt.”

“Yeah,” he said. “A person can't help but notice.”

Doc took blankets from the cabinet he'd fetched Lonesome's medicine out of, a lifetime ago, when Wyatt had believed Stone Creek to be a relatively serene community, the incident at the bank notwithstanding. He covered the other two bodies—decency, again, Wyatt supposed—then began pulling off Carl's boots.

They were worn at the soles, and lined with old newspaper, evidently contrived to double as socks.

Wyatt felt the sadness again. Wondered about the letter in his vest pocket, and if Carl and Billy had a ma, like Doc thought, and maybe other kin, too, watching some country road for their horses.

On a less sentimental note, he reckoned if Billy wasn't someplace around Stone Creek now, he soon would be. Word of Carl's shooting would bring him on the run, with blood in his eye. Soon as Billy Justice knew Wyatt had been in town when the shoot-out took place, Billy would lay the blame at his feet and come gunning for him.

It was the only bright spot in this whole dismal mess.

“If you're not going to help,” Sarah told him, “please get out of the way.”

Wyatt blinked, stepped back. Stepped forward again. “
I'll
help Doc bathe these yahoos,” he said. “You go home and look after Owen and Lonesome and your father.”

Sarah bristled.

“Go,” Doc told her. “Wyatt's right. This is no fit work for a woman.”

“What work
is
‘fit for a woman,' Doc?” Sarah demanded.

“This is no time to talk women's suffrage,” Doc said. “Go.”

“I'm sure the deputy wouldn't allow me to walk home alone,” Sarah said tartly, hands resting on her hips. “After all, I could be accosted on the street!”

Three dead men, all that blood and a stench that made him want to gag, and she'd almost made Wyatt laugh.

Almost.

Doc took the basin and the rag out of her hands and set them aside. “I delivered twins a few hours ago, Sarah. It was a five-mile ride, there and back, on that cussed old mule of mine. Now I've got bodies to wash down and embalm. I simply do not possess the inclination to argue with you.”

“It's true that she oughtn't to walk home alone,” Wyatt said.

“Ha!” Sarah spouted, with a triumphant motion of one hand.

“At least go upstairs, then, and make us a pot of coffee,” Doc replied coolly. He'd had more experience handling Sarah than Wyatt had, and Wyatt was bent on watching and learning.

“Women's work!” Sarah said, flinging up both hands this time.

But she gathered her skirts and tromped up the staircase to the second floor. The kitchen must have been directly overhead, because things took to clattering and clanking straightaway.

Wyatt smiled again. Then helped Doc strip down the bodies, one by one, and bathe them. This involved going upstairs, from time to time, to dip more hot water from the reservoir on Doc's wood-burning cookstove. Wyatt undertook the task, each time hoping Sarah might spare him an amiable word, or even a glance, but she'd put a pot of coffee on to brew, sat herself down in a rocking chair turned to face a window, and paid him no attention whatsoever.

When the awful work was done, the bodies blanket-draped, Wyatt wanted nothing so much as to get naked himself and slide chin-deep into Rowdy's big-city bathtub. Well, there was one thing he wanted more than a bath hot enough to scald his flesh and some good old-fashioned lye soap, but he wasn't going to get it.