“He gives up his money that easily?”
“There’s a couple of real greenbacks on top of each bag. And a lot of worthless paper underneath.”
I laughed. “You show business fellers can teach us all a trick or two.”
“Just let it happen, and there’ll be no trouble,” Jeff said.
“No, I won’t let it happen,” I said. “If anyone attempts to rob your company, they’ll have to deal with me. And I shoot straight.”
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE
Things were getting ugly fast. I hurried back to the office and collected the double-barreled sawed-off twelve gauge, checked the loads, and hurried back to Turk’s barn. There were growing numbers of townspeople collecting there, watching the show wagons and coaches and teams that the teamsters were harnessing.
There weren’t any show people yet; the final show was still playing.
I wished Rusty was on hand for backup, but he’d gone to bed. He’d worked double time since I put the badge back on, and I didn’t blame him for getting some shut-eye. I’d be alone this time. There wasn’t going to be any thefts this night if I could help it, but I wasn’t sure how to arrange that. A good shotgun spoke with authority, a lot more than a revolver could, and it was exactly what I might need this hot night.
I plowed into the crowd. Half of them were good folks I knew well, but they was looking pretty ornery, so I started to talk some. The first feller I found wearing a six-gun was the mayor, George Waller.
“You come to watch the show pull out?” I asked.
“No, I’ve come to keep the show from pulling out,” he said.
“You have a problem?”
“They’ve got every cent in Doubtful, and are making off with it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Someone busted the bank, and it has to be that outfit.”
“You got any evidence of it?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “They aren’t rolling until they dump every cent they got on the ground right there.”
“What about money they earned from selling tickets and doing the show?”
“Every cent stays here, and that’s how it’s going to be. And don’t you interfere, because if you do, you’re dead meat.”
“I suppose you think you’re taking back what got took, but them show people might think you’re stealing what they earned doing that show.”
“They cleaned out this town, and they’re not moving until every cent comes back.”
“You figure they blew the bank safe last night, middle of their show?”
“They had it done, and that stolen money’s in the wagons somewhere, or it’s going to be. We’re keeping it, and we’re putting Doubtful back on its feet.”
“So you’re going to hold up the theater company, right?”
“You stay out of it, Pickens. It’s going to happen, and if you stop it, you’ll find a gun stuck in your back faster than you can wonder who’s about to blow you off.”
“I guess that’s all part of your mayor duties, right, Waller? Staging an armed robbery. That’ll get you re-elected.”
“You stay out of this, Cotton, or you’ll be six feet under.”
“I see that as a threat to a peace officer. And don’t call me Cotton. I got that name hung on me and it makes me mad.”
Waller, he just grinned. There were more and more of them town businessmen, town fathers, and all collecting around there, plus a mess of women, and if there would be a fight, a lot of innocent folks would perish or be hurt real hard. I sure didn’t know how to slow down this thing, and my thick head wasn’t coming up with ideas, neither.
“I’m keeping the peace, Mister Mayor, even if you ain’t. And if anyone dies, you’ll find yourself in the dock for murder. That’s all I’m going to say.”
But old George, he just looked real cocky and smiled away at me. It was all I needed to know, actually. The thoughts rattling in his head were inflaming the rest of those people, most of them good folk but now turning into a real tough mob.
“I guess I’ll say one more thing, Waller. There’s twelve buckshot in each barrel.”
He eyed the shotgun, and then shrugged it off. There were thirty or forty armed citizens crowding around the show wagons now, making the draft horses skittish.
“Back away now, these Belgians kick,” Jeff said, pushing all them virtuous citizens back from the caravan.
Down the street at the opera house the show was letting out. The first people hit the street and lit up cheroots. Jeff nodded, and the freighters, each team led by a teamster, steered them lumbering wagons that way to load up the sets and all that. The coaches would be next. The Follies ladies would get in, and the show would be on the road. Or so I hoped.
But even as the freighters headed for the stage door, so did the mob. It turned into a big procession, the coaches and wagons, with crowds of armed men on either side. I saw the head freighter, Jeff, cursing and chasing away rascal boys, who were tossing stones at the horses. This here was getting serious.
The coaches arrived, three of them to carry the cast, but those fellers pulled up in front of the theater, not at the stage door in the alley. They were good Concords, hired out of Cheyenne for this tour, driven by some good old boys who could spit a few yards.
Now the crowd shifted away from the stage door, where the teamsters were loading sets and props into the freight wagons. The townspeople, they surged right up to the maroon coaches and waited in the flickering light of a lamp at the box office. It was pretty dark. I knew what they were waiting for, and pretty quick it happened. One by one, those pretty gals, wearing light dresses against the summer heat, climbed into the coaches and settled there, some on the jump seats. The crowd watched them, but didn’t do nothing. No one was waving a Watch and Ward sign at them. The gals looked real subdued, and a little afraid, so I made a point of standing between them and that mob.
There was one empty coach up front, with a team of good matched blacks to draw it, and that’s where the crowd was drifting now that the gals were all settled. The theater doors were open and I could see lights bobbing in there, and then the maestro appeared. Alphonse de Jardine, wearing that black silk stovepipe, a little feller in the black suit and starched white shirt, he paused, stared at the mob, and then steadily paced toward the coach. He wasn’t carrying any satchel. He wasn’t carrying a thing. Just a little feller, head of that show, getting ready to roll.
“Hold it right there, Jardine,” said Waller.
Jardine stopped at once.
“George, you put that gun away,” I said.
But Waller didn’t. “You don’t leave here alive until you drop the loot,” Waller said.
Now there were twenty, thirty revolvers out. If shooting started, a lot of people would get hurt, and it was getting real bad by the second. There were armed men on both sides of the coaches, and a few out in front, so the coaches were surrounded by town merchants with revolvers in their fists. If something set them off, they’d be shooting at one another, and there’d be enough bodies to keep Maxwell’s Funeral Parlor profitable for ten years. This here was what they called a circular firing squad.
“Ah, good sir, there’s only a trifle. We made little, and it went to paying for the theater. And your hotels.”
“You got the bank money,” Waller said. “There’s gold and greenbacks in there, eleven thousand worth.”
“My friend, come search. Take your pick, all the coaches.”
“No, Waller, you ain’t gonna search,” I said. “You ain’t gonna rob this company of one nickel, and you’re going to lower them revolvers before a lot of innocent people get hurt.”
Mayor Waller, he just smiled. He knew who was the boss, with all them ugly six-guns pointing at Jardine, the gals, and me, including at our backs.
I carried my shotgun in the crook of my arm. If I lifted it, my duties as sheriff of Doubtful would come to a bloody halt along with my heart.
“Waller, you come up here,” I said.
“He’s welcome to search anywhere,” Jardine said. “My friends, let this man look wherever he wishes for the gold.”
“All right, George, you heard him. You look around in there, and in the boot, and then the next ones, and when you’re done, you’ll tell this crowd to go home.”
Waller, he sensed he had won, which is what I wanted. He headed for Jardine’s coach, climbed up to check out the boot, and probed the interior.
“That gold’s somewhere,” he said.
Waller started for the next two coaches, and them gals all got out, and stood there looking mighty scared. They were so pretty that half those shooters were staring at the gals, which maybe was a good thing.
“These boots are full of luggage,” Waller said.
Jardine, he didn’t say nothing.
“You ready to let this show leave town?” I asked.
“I want to search every trunk,” Waller said.
“You got any evidence these people robbed the bank?”
“Who else?” he said.
“Let them search the trunks,” Jardine said. “These are fine, upstanding citizens, and they’ve welcomed us to Doubtful, and now we welcome them to our underwear and corsets and dainties.”
Funny thing was, the town fellers snickered and then laughed. If Waller started pulling out trunks and pawing all the little undies of those showgirls, he’d sure make a spectacle of himself. And he knew it.
“Gold is heavy, Mr. Mayor. Lift those trunks,” Jardine said.
Waller did pull out a couple and rattled them and put them back. He was defeated.
Maybe the Grand Luxemburg Follies would leave town in one piece. Maybe the citizens would go home in one piece. Maybe I would, too. But I was ready to turn them all into Swiss cheese if that’s what it took.
It’s a funny thing how a mob leaks willpower sometimes. This had gone from a murderous mob to a sort of sheepish one. It was still a powderkeg, though, with crazy armed men on both sides of those coaches.
“All right, you people let the company go,” I said. “This is over. These people have to head out.”
They let it happen. Jardine, he looked around, invited some of them gals to ride with him, and the jehus sitting on the boxes snapped lines over croups and them three coaches slowly rolled into the night, and the freighters followed.
None of it was my doing. Jardine, he’d played the right cards. Maybe he had been in front of an angry mob like that before. Maybe it was just that he was pint-sized, and somehow grown men with revolvers didn’t want to gun down a feller hardly four feet tall in his top hat. I didn’t know. I’m not much of one to dwell on something. Whatever happened, it worked well enough. That company rolled around the town square and out the road to Laramie, the wagons muffled in the hot night.
I’d promised to escort them as far as the county line, but I’d catch up in a bit. There was nothing slower than a big outfit like that.
“Well, George,” I said to the mayor, “you got a law that says it’s illegal to wear sidearms in Doubtful. You want to turn yourself in?”
“Go to hell, Sheriff.”
“I could pinch the rest of them. I got a list in my head. It’s your law. You put her on the books for me to enforce. It’s a good law. Pretty near twenty people might have died, and a mess more would be hurt real bad this night. The law’s there to prevent that.”
“Go to hell, Pickens. I still think the loot’s in that company. This town’s ruined. There’s hardly change enough to keep an ice cream parlor in business.”
“You got proof? Some witnesses? You give me proof that they robbed the bank, and I’ll go after them. They ain’t a mile out of town.”
Waller, he got real quiet. “Well, it’s good riddance,” he said. “We’ll close down that opera house and maybe that’ll keep our money safe.”
I wasn’t going to argue with a man whose brain was fried, so I just cut loose.
Turk was waiting for me over at the livery barn with a saddled nag.
“I hope they get robbed,” he said. “They cleaned out Doubtful, and we need it back.”
I laughed at him. The nag was not particularly obedient, but I’d ridden worse. I steered him into the warm night, and hoped that Doubtful could take care of itself while I was gone.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
I rode out into a quiet June night. The variety company was somewhere ahead, lumbering along at the pace of the freight wagons. It would be a long while before they got to the railroad, and they would have to pass through Medicine Bow County, where Ike Berg had been the law, to get there. I wished my badge stretched down to the tracks, but it quit at the county line, and that was where I had to cut loose.
The barn-sour nag wanted to hightail back to Turk’s, but I held him steady. I wish I had Critter, who was ornery and sunk his teeth into my hide, but had a good heart when he wasn’t trying to kill me. He’d never spent a barn-sour day in his life. It sure was a quiet night, and I enjoyed the peace of the open country. Sometimes I had to get away from a town to let nature work on me a little, and get all the mad out of me. Not just my mad, but the mad of everyone else in a town. Nature had its way of healing me up when things got mean in town, and now I rode easily through deep dark. In a while there’d be a sliver of moon to help, but for now I was just letting the horse find the road I couldn’t see.
I wondered how them teamsters leading the freight wagons, and Jehus on the coaches, figured out the road, but they had been moving the company around for a long while, and seemed to have good night vision.
Then, soft on the June night wind, I heard the thump of a shot, and another, and several more, and I knew that trouble lay ahead, and it was in my Puma County, and that the variety show was in trouble, and that I’d have to kick this barn-sour livery horse into action.
I encouraged the beast with my heels, since I wasn’t wearing spurs, and the horse crowhopped and carried on like a spoiled brat, and I whacked him harder, and he took off real good, having met his master at last, and we sailed through the inky dark toward them stray bullets. But the sounds had quit. It wasn’t hardly an exchange, and wasn’t a war, and it had stopped about as fast as it had started up, with just a flurry.
After a while I did spot a lantern waving ahead, and slowed real careful, not wanting to be mistook. In fact, it was still mighty black, so I just slid off that ornery plug and walked quietly toward the variety company train. They was stopped there. The rear coach was somewhat behind the rest. I studied the scene. There was but a single lamp, and some people milling around near a stagecoach, and something on the ground, and nothing else to see. It was blacker than the inside of an ink bottle.
“Hello, ahead,” I yelled.
Those shadowy figures turned.
“This here’s the sheriff,” I said.
No one responded. I had all the advantage, being in pitch dark, so I edged in, keeping my six-gun handy. But I didn’t expect to shoot anyone, since I wouldn’t know who I was about to perforate. That livery horse, he liked being led. I knew the type; he hated to carry a burden, but didn’t mind being hauled around on a string. I know a lot of folks like that horse. They’d do anything not to work, anything but carry a load.
I studied the crowd ahead, before the lantern light fell on me, and I couldn’t see any drawn sidearms.
“All right now, what’s the trouble?” I asked.
Now I could get a good look. There was someone stretched out, and even before I could make out the details I knew who it was. Alphonse de Jardine, the proprietor of the Grand Luxemburg Follies was lying there, and most of the rest were the show gals and a few teamsters, and they were staring at me as I edged in.
Jardine was dead. The bleak lantern light revealed a ruined face where a bullet had ended the little feller’s earthly life. The gals, they were real quiet. None was weeping. They looked more than a little scared. The teamsters just stared.
I spotted Ambrosia, star of the Follies, with a shawl wrapped around her.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Some men stopped us,” she said.
“How many?”
“Just two,” a teamster replied. “Both with shotguns.”
“One skinny and one built like a block?”
“And masked,” Ambrosia said.
“They knew which coach Mr. Jardine was in and went straight to it and pulled him out,” the teamster said. “They simply shot him. Like they were waiting for him.”
“Killed him? How?”
“One pulled a revolver and shot him,” another teamster said. “Just like that. Nothing said.”
“No one even talked? Jardine didn’t?”
“Oh, Mr. Jardine, he asked what these gents wanted, and they didn’t reply. They just fired on him,” the teamster said.
Ambrosia was leaking tears, visible even in the dim light of the bulls-eye lantern. I was feeling real bad, and wish I had been with this outfit from the moment they rolled out of Doubtful.
I gradually got the whole story. Jardine’s stagecoach was last in the caravan, and two bandits rode out of a pitch-black night, closed in beside the coach, jammed revolvers through the curtain, and told the jehu to stop. The driver stopped the team. The bandits asked Jardine to step out. The gals with him were terrified. They heard a shot in the dark and the thud of a body. One bandit kept the driver covered while the other one pitched satchels out of the boot, got down to a false bottom in the boot, pulled that out and removed something or other from under it. I got most of this from the driver, who talked in brief bursts. He said he didn’t expect to live more than a few more moments. But they let him go, loaded some satchels onto a spare pack animal, and rode into the blackness. The whole robbery was amazing because there was no moon, nothing but a little starlight, and required night vision of a sort that few people possessed.
The rest of the caravan didn’t knew what was happening and continued onward for another two or three hundred yards, and then knew something had happened. I needed a description of them two robbers, thinking they were probably Iceberg and Luke the Butcher, but I got as many descriptions as there were witnesses, and I sure couldn’t get anyone to say that one was skeleton-thin, and the other was built like a butcher block. They were just a pair of males with black bandanas over their noses and nothing else to identify them. No one could even say what sort of nags the bandits had or how many. One thing was plain. They knew Jardine, and knew he had a hiding place under the false bottom of the boot of the last stagecoach, and knew there was something in it, and knew that if they killed the little maestro of that show, the whole company would fall apart. And that was exactly right.
It probably was Iceberg and his crony, but damned if I could prove it. I didn’t have a single reliable witness. Them two rode off into the blackness, direction unknown, and I wouldn’t find a track until daylight, and I’d be lucky to find any at all. They could go anywhere on the compass.
Meanwhile, the rest of the company and the teamsters and jehus all collected around that lamp, and eyed the feller who’d created this show.
“I think I’ve got to get you in this coach to come back to Doubtful with me,” I said.
The gals and the driver, they just stared.
“All of you on this coach. I think we’d better go back there. We’ve got some things to do there, and I’ll want to get statements.”
“But who’ll pay for us?” one asked.
“Jardine’s estate,” I said.
They stared. There wasn’t an estate. These coaches were leased.
Finally one of the teamsters, the one who walked the lead ox team, he asked if they could just go ahead to the railroad.
“We didn’t see it, didn’t know about it,” he said.
“We’ve got to find a way to get out of here,” another said.
“You from Laramie?”
“Some of us, and Cheyenne.”
We went back and forth with that, and finally one of them that could read and write, he put down the names of the outfit and who was in it, and I got the names of the ones in the company, and the ones in the stagecoach where Jardine was riding. They agreed to come on back. We were only two or three miles from Doubtful.
“I think you people have some burying to do,” I said.
There were a couple of fellers who were second in command, and they agreed, and that’s how it worked out. One coach came back with me, and I let the rest of them poor devils go. Their life had come to a halt, and they had a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to get to Chicago or wherever them shows were put together. But they were all hardened show people, used to the worst, and I thought them gals could all get married in twenty-four hours if they wanted to stick around Wyoming, so maybe it wasn’t quite so hard on them.
They lifted poor Jardine gently, and slipped him across the rear seat and covered him with a blanket. I borrowed that bulls-eye lamp, a candle inside of a glass container, and searched the area, looking for anything them bandits dropped, or any piece of evidence, but it looked like a clean haul. They didn’t get much. Jardine hadn’t made more than a few dollars in Doubtful, between getting fined by Judge Rampart and paying bills and dealing with them Watch and Ward people. So that robbery wasn’t worth more than some pocket change. And a man dead for it, too.
There’d be another grave up there in the Doubtful burying ground, next to their advance man, Pinky Pearl. Now I had two murders to solve, and another robbery, and it didn’t matter that I knew who done it; I couldn’t prove a thing.
I helped the jehu turn the coach around and we headed back to Doubtful, a real slow and sorry procession, death and misery in that coach. I led with that lamp, since it was so dark the driver couldn’t see the trail, and we just rattled through a miserable summer night, ignoring mosquitos, not even the crickets chirping, and pretty soon we rolled into Doubtful, which was blacker than I’d ever seen the place. I didn’t know the time, but it was late, and the town was slumbering, and hoping that one lawman and one deputy could spare it from trouble. But trouble had come.
I had a lot to do. I had them people wait in the jailhouse while I fetched Rusty out of his slumbers. He sure didn’t like my hammering at his door, but pretty quick he was up and I told him to look after those people and get statements from them and put that stuff down in writing. He could do that; I sure would be licking a pencil trying to get it down.
Next was to wake up Maxwell and deliver the body of Alphonse de Jardine. That took more doing than waking up Rusty, and Maxwell refused to get out of bed.
“Leave it on my doorstep,” he said.
“You get your carcass over there and take it, or I’ll leave you on your doorstep,” I said.
“I don’t bury theater folk,” he said.
“Then I’ll bury you,” I replied.
He sort of got the message.
I finally got the jehu to drive the coach over to Maxwell’s place, where the undertaker took Jardine off the seat, and was pretty ornery about it.
“Shot through the mouth. I suppose that’s fitting,” Maxwell said. “That’s how anyone in that business should check out. Talkers deserve it. Writers should get their hands shot off. Judges should get their privates shot off.”
“Empty them pockets,” I said, thinking that funeral parlor operators were all too good at it.
Maxwell glared at me, and slowly turned Jardine’s pockets out. One of them contained a half-filled blue medicine bottle of something or other. But there wasn’t any prescription label. I shook it a little, and the stuff seemed thick. Maybe he had some evil disease. He had some lucifers and an enameled tin with small wad of cotton in it that smelled odd. I collected all that stuff and put it in a flour sack and hauled it away from Maxwell’s greedy fingers.
The jehu had put up the coach at Turk’s and put the team in the pens, since no one was awake there, either. By the time I got all that taken care of, Rusty had got all them victims settled in the jailhouse and was taking statements about what happened. He sure could write pretty fine. He was sitting them at the desk in the lamplight, and was getting their stories. He was interviewing Ambrosia.
“What’s your name?” Rusty asked.
“Margot Parvenue,” she said.
“Ain’t you Ambrosia?”
“You want my moniker or not, buster?”
Rusty, he shut up and scribbled. He could write longhand, which was going to be a problem for me because I never could figure it out.
Her story was the same as the rest. Them two bandits closed in, stopped the rear coach and let the rest of them go ahead in the night. They pulled Jardine out and killed him, lit a candlelantern, went into the coach boot, threw out the satchels, and then began tearing at the boot until they got to some hidden part, and took whatever was in there and vanished into the night.
The pair wore dark bandanas; one was skinny, one was thick. They hardly spoke. That’s all she could say about it.
All their stories matched up. I asked them to stick around and bury Jardine, and after that I’d free them to go wherever they were going.
I’d start looking for Iceberg and the Butcher, and see what sort of loot they were carrying. I knew who done it; all I had to do was catch them.