The Trailsman #294

Martha had no real idea where they were because she’d never been in the part of Portland where the Bryans had taken her. It was an old deserted warehouse not far from the docks, surrounded by businesses run by Chinese. The warehouse was full of smells that indicated it had at one time been used to store things like coffee, tobacco, and dried fish.

Neither of the Bryan brothers had spoken to her as they rode there. They had arrived by going through a dark, muddy alley. If anybody saw or heard them, there was no sign. Hob opened a big back door to the building, and Sam rode inside, keeping Martha in the saddle with him. Hob led his horse in behind them and closed the door.

It was black dark inside, but Hob seemed to be familiar with the place. After a little fumbling around, he located a coal oil lamp and lit the wick with a lucifer. He replaced the chimney and set the lamp on an overturned barrel, the only thing resembling furniture in the building.

The lamp didn’t provide much light in such a large empty space, but Martha could see that in one corner there were some dirty blankets on the floor near the barrel. The blankets didn’t appear to have been used for a while.

Sam released Martha. She slid to the floor, and Hob pointed his shotgun at her.

“We’re gonna have to tie you up,” he said. “Maybe it won’t be for long.”

Sam tied her hands with a piece of rope and took her over to the blankets. While she stood aside, he shook out the blankets, dislodging a couple of spiders along with a considerable amount of dust and dirt.

“Ain’t very good accommodations,” Sam said, laying the last blanket back down. “Best we can do for you, though.”

“No need to talk snotty to us,” Hob said. “It was your father that got you into this. He’s the one got us to rob the bank. He might even be the one that killed the guard.”

Martha had been wondering about who had really killed the guard ever since she’d talked to Fargo. Not that she had broached the subject with her father, any more than she’d told him that she’d informed Fargo of the plot to send Custis Kane to kill the Bryans.

And there was something else she hadn’t told her father, either. She blushed in the darkness just to think of what she and Fargo had done. Even in her current situation, she felt a quick rush of arousal at the thought.

She was worried about Fargo. The Bryans hadn’t mentioned him, but she was certain he’d gone to warn them. Yet in spite of that, Corby had been killed. She was sad about that. She had never loved Corby, but he had paid attention to her and had seemed to like her, which was more than she could say for Albert Tomlin, who wanted only to use her. In his way, Albert was as bad as Hob and Sam.

“You can sit on those blankets if you want to,” Sam told her. “They ain’t exactly clean, but they’re cleaner than the floor.”

Martha didn’t want to spend the night standing up, so she sat on the blankets and leaned back against the wall, keeping her bound hands in her lap.

“How long you reckon it’ll take the judge to get things done?” Sam said.

Hob looked at Martha and shook his head. Then he and Sam walked off into the dark shadows on the other side of the building. Martha could hear them whispering together, but she could catch only a few words.

Judge Lawrence’s first stop was a house not far from his own. He went inside, and Fargo waited in the shadows of the trees along the street for him to come back out. If he was gone for too long, Fargo would try to find out what was happening, but the Trailsman figured there was one other stop to make.

Sure enough, Lawrence was back in less than five minutes. With him was a younger man whom Fargo knew must be Albert Tomlin. The two men hurried off, with Fargo not far behind. It was easy to follow people who didn’t know you were around and who were too busy thinking about their other problems to consider that someone might be interested in where they were going.

They stayed in the residential area not far from where Lawrence lived. After going a couple of blocks, they turned through a picket fence and went up onto the porch of a white frame house. They cleaned the mud off their shoes on a little iron scraper that was put there for that purpose, and Lawrence knocked on the door.

The man who responded to the knock looked exactly the way a banker should look, and Fargo knew he must be Jonathan Orcutt. He opened the door and stepped aside to let Tomlin and Lawrence enter.

Fargo thought it was time for him to take a chance on getting closer to the house. He wanted to talk to the men, but first he wanted to hear some of what they had to say to each other.

He slipped around to the side of the house and stepped into a flower bed by the parlor window. The window was closed because of the earlier rain, but Fargo could hear well enough if he stood right to the side of it, staying near the wall and out of sight of the men in the room.

This creeping around in towns was easy to do, but Fargo didn’t like it. He wanted to be out where a man had more room to breathe. If things worked out the way he hoped they would, he soon would be.

“They came right into my parlor,” he said, the outrage clear in his voice. “They didn’t even bother to scrape the mud off their feet.”

“What a shame,” Orcutt said. “And I suppose they expected you to confess to your crimes and get them a pardon from the governor.”

“No. They took Martha instead.” Rage shook Lawrence’s voice when he spoke his daughter’s name. It was replaced by a note of sadness and desperation. “I believe they plan to kill her in retaliation for what you did. It got Corby killed.”

“What I did?” Orcutt said. “We all agreed on what had to be done, Judge. And the only thing that went wrong is that Kane seems to have killed only one of the Bryans instead of all of them.”

“If that’s true, the Bryan brothers are more resourceful than I would have guessed. But hiring Kane seemed the right thing to do.”

“But it wasn’t,” Tomlin said. “We made a mistake. We shouldn’t have endangered Martha.”

Orcutt sounded completely calm. “We had no intention of that. We couldn’t have guessed that things would turn out this way. Now we will have to deal with things as they come. What demands did the Bryans make of you, Judge?”

“All Hob said was that as soon as I cleared things up with the law, I could have my daughter back.”

“Just that the Bryans had broken into my house and taken my daughter away. I implied that they did it out of revenge for their sentence in my court.”

“Oh, I think you do,” Orcutt said. “Don’t you, Albert?” Albert said he had no idea. Fargo could see that it was Orcutt who was the brains behind things, not the judge or Tomlin. They were just following his lead.

“Think for a moment, gentlemen,” Orcutt said. “How was Lawrence supposed to get word to them that he’d cleared things up, as they put it?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Tomlin said. “Did Hob tell you how to get word to him, Judge?”

“No, he didn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me. I suppose I was too worried about Martha.”

Fargo leaned his weight against the wall. It sounded to him like Orcutt knew exactly where the Bryans had gone. Fargo thought he knew how Orcutt had figured it out, and if he was right, it shouldn’t take Tomlin and Lawrence long to catch on.

Fargo had been right about where the Bryans had gone. But he didn’t know where the warehouse was, and he didn’t think the men in the house would discuss the location.

“They’d kill Martha if we did,” Lawrence said. “That’s why they took her.”

“I don’t want that to happen,” Tomlin said. “We’ll have to try something else.”

“We can’t go up against them on our own,” the judge said. “We’re not gunmen.”

“I agree,” Orcutt said. “The law is the only answer. You may have to sacrifice Martha.”

For a few seconds the room was quiet. Then Orcutt said, “I’m the kind of man who wants to protect his own life and reputation. Which of you wants to spend time in the prison where the Bryans were held? You, Tomlin? You, Judge?”

“She’s my daughter,” Lawrence said, but his voice was weak, and Fargo thought he might give in.

No matter how bad the Bryans were, Lawrence and Orcutt were worse. But Fargo was beginning to have a little hope for Tomlin. At least he was standing up to them. For now.

“I don’t want to go to prison,” Tomlin said. “But I’m not going to stand by and see Martha put in danger, maybe killed. I’ll tell the law the truth if neither of you has the gumption to do it.”

There was silence again, and Fargo risked a quick glance through the window. He saw Orcutt pointing a derringer at Tomlin, whose face was twisted with a mixture of rage and hopelessness.

“Damn you, Orcutt,” Tomlin said as Fargo leaned back against the wall. “Damn you to hell.”

It was too bad, Fargo thought. He’d just started to think Tomlin might be a better man than the others. He should have walked over and slapped the hideout gun out of Orcutt’s hand, taking the risk of being shot. But at the first sign of danger, he’d caved in.

It looked like it was still up to Fargo to find a way out of the mess things had gotten into, and he still didn’t know where the warehouse was.

He was trying to decide what to do when he heard someone creeping along the alley in back of Orcutt’s house.