South Pass City sat quietly in a bowl amongst the sage-covered hills sheathing Willow Creek, along which gold had been found and carted off several years ago, leaving the shadow of a town in its bustling wake.
Really, the town wasn’t even a shadow of its former self anymore. It was a sad ruin that the high desert appeared to be taking back by hook and crook—the sage returning over ancient wheel ruts, tumbleweeds blowing between mostly abandoned shanties and stock pens and business buildings, some blowing straight through via the town’s old main drag without anything to interrupt them. Not horses or wagons or the hundreds of rushing prospectors, cardsharps, whores, cold-steel artists, and confidence men who’d once called the town home—at least for a season or two.
Spurr had killed the legendary gunman Lyle Tate here about seven years ago, at the height of the boom. That was when Zachariah Dawson had been the town marshal, boasting four deputies, all gone now. No, not gone, Spurr thought as, riding into the eerily silent town, he glanced over to the town’s cemetery on a flat-topped knoll overlooking the creek. The boneyard was a collection of stone and board markers and wooden crosses presided over by a single ragged juniper and a sprawling cottonwood.
Dawson and his deputies had all been killed during an outlaw raid on the town and planted there. A few lawmen had worn the South Pass City badge since then, but, as far as Spurr had heard, they’d merely drifted on because as the gold disappeared and the town died, there was no longer any need for them. Certainly no need now. While most of the buildings were still here, most were boarded up, abandoned, or falling down.
A few horses were tied here and there to hitchracks before the few surviving businesses, but mostly only the tumbleweeds moved, nudged by breezes. The town was now mostly a supply camp for area farms and ranches and the mining camps pocking the Wind Rivers in the northwest. A loose shutter slapped against the old Wind River Hotel and Saloon; it danced in a sudden wind blowing down off the high mountains, tapping and scraping, tapping and scraping in feeble tribute to the cacophony of song and dance and ribald laughter that had once emanated from one of the most lucrative hotels west of Laramie.
Spurr drew up in front of the Overland Trail House. The three-story, wood-frame hotel had never been as prime a destination as the Wind River, but it had done a fine business in its own right, patronized by miners and saddle tramps who partook of its slightly lower grade of whiskey and whores, but which now looked brown and shrunken and just another dusty, sun-weathered ruin despite the OPEN sign hanging in its dusty front window.
Spurr swung down from the leather and looked at Erin, who had taken over her own reins and had obediently followed the old lawman across the rolling foothills—complying with his wishes to stay seated on the outlaw horse, and to follow him, but doing nothing more than that. Saying nothing. Merely riding. A husk of a woman owning a heartbeat, breath passing in and out of her lungs. But nothing more than that. If she’d had her gun, Spurr was sure that she would have used it on herself long before now.
He would not bother with a silly attempt at best of trying to arrest the Vultures. Things had gone too far for that. He was a lawman, not a vigilante, but sometimes the law had to stop lawbreakers in the only way it could, lest more innocents should perish. There simply were not enough lawmen or judges to stop them without one man—the last lawman north of all-out hell—taking extreme measures.
He would kill Stanhope and the other Vultures for Erin and her murdered boy, if not for Mason and the other lawmen and all the others this bunch had killed in cold blood.
Spurr had little hope of taking them all down, of course. He himself was exhausted, feeling little more than a shell himself. And he would be alone in his stand against the savages. But he’d get Stanhope if none of the others. Maybe, with luck, his ghost would rise up out of South Pass City’s boothill and take down the others with their own guns as they slept. Before they could continue their reign of bloody murder and unbridled torment.
Spurr reached up and took the reins out of Erin’s hands. She did not look at him but only gazed at the hotel as if trying to figure out what it was, as though she’d never seen such a structure before. Spurr tied their reins around the hitchrack that bulged around the worn spots in its peeled pine crosspole, then helped the woman out of her saddle, setting her gently on the ground before taking her hand, sliding his rifle out of its saddle boot, and leading her up the porch steps. The second step from the top was rotted out, and Spurr stepped over it, then turned to help Erin over it, as well. He led her across the creaky porch littered with old newspapers and tumbleweeds and through the hotel’s batwing doors.
He kept the woman behind him as, while the doors slapped, he stopped a few feet from the entrance and looked around, seeing only one customer in the place—the half-breed, sitting at a table on the room’s far left. The big, brown-skinned man sat casually, almost insolently kicked back in his chair, his saddle and rifle on the floor beside him, his saddlebags draped across his lap. He was sewing a patch into the back of one of the pouches, the contents of the pouch—an old coffeepot, a tin frying pan, a pouch of Arbuckles, some cartridge boxes—spilled around a mug of frothy beer on the table before him.
When he looked up, his green eyes glowed startlingly in the crisp, clear light from the doors and windows.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Spurr asked the man, annoyed. He was getting tired of the man’s unexpected appearances.
Henry looked up while continuing to sew the leather patch into his saddlebag pouch. “Me? Hell, I’m darnin’ this old saddlebag. Plum wore out, I reckon.”
Spurr snorted. He ran a hand across his mouth and walked over to the bar paneled in dull green wainscoting on the room’s right side. He stopped short when he saw a blond woman standing behind the counter, in front of a back bar painted the same dull green, with a cracked, warped, age-spotted mirror behind several green shelves stocked with dusty bottles and glasses.
Spurr felt his jaw hinges loosen as he stared at the woman, a slow smile crawling across his ragged, dusty face. “Well…Della Ramsay. You still here?”
“Where else would I go?” the woman said in her sexily raspy voice, leaning forward, hands spread atop the bar.
She held a cigarette in her right hand; the smoke curled up along the right side of her blue-eyed face that was still fine-lined and even-featured and pretty despite her years. She must have been pushing forty, with crow’s-feet around her eyes and mouth. But her long, straight hair was as blond as he remembered, with only a few streaks of gray. Her eyes were as clear and frank as those of a twenty-year-old.
Spurr had met Della Ramsay years ago in Leadville, when she had been plying the trade, and had last seen her here in South Pass City, working for percentages again but also dealing faro at the Wind River. He’d never known much about her—aside from that she knew her business right well—but he’d heard that she’d been married a few times, mostly to cardsharps and prospectors, though never for longer than a few months at a time.
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, and a childish light danced in them. “Like the new digs?”
“You own this place now?”
“Why not? It was free. Old Handly pulled out last year. Tried to sell it for a dollar. I offered fifty cents, and he just threw up his hands including the deed to the place and rode away.” Della chuckled. “So I contracted with the Davis outfit to haul me in a few bottles of whiskey every spring and fall from Rawlins, and I got a business. Not gettin’ rich, but I wouldn’t know what to do with rich…”
She looked at Erin still standing just inside the doorway behind Spurr and frowned dubiously. “Who’s…your friend, Spurr?”
“Erin Wilde, meet Della Ramsay.” Spurr glanced back at Erin, who stood staring uncertainly into the shadows at the rear of the wooden-floored, low-ceiling room. Seeing that she was not going to offer a response, he turned back to Della and said softly, “Vultures.”
Della’s reaction to the name of the notorious gang, much feared in these parts, was not oblique. She set a hand on her chest, worrying the brooch pinned to a black choker at her throat. “Don’t tell me…”
“They’re behind me, Della.”
She cast a nervous glance out the window on both sides of the swinging doors. “I hope you’ve got someone to back you, Spurr.”
“Did have. They’re dead. It’s just me, Della. I’ll be back down for a drink, but I’d like to get Mrs. Wilde situated in a room.”
“No charge, Spurr.” Della offered a weak smile. “I figure you’ll drink plenty. You always did.”
Spurr tossed several gold coins onto the bar. “Not this time. Gotta keep my head about me. Oh, I’ll wet my whistle but I don’t reckon I’ll be fillin’ any trash barrels.” He plopped one more coin onto the bar. “But I’d admire to have a cork pulled for me when I get back.”
Della winked. “Take whichever room…or rooms…you want. I ain’t exactly overburdened just now. Waitin’ on the fall roundup, which usually brings a few punchers in. Doors are open.”
Spurr glanced again at Henry, who sipped his beer, set his mug back down on the table, then resumed stitching his saddlebag pouch. It was hard to tell if he’d been paying attention to the conversation. His broad, cherry face was as stony as a veteran gambler’s. But he likely didn’t miss much.
The old lawman walked over and took Erin’s hand and led her to the back of the room and up the narrow stairs. He opened the first door he came to on the second floor, led her inside, and opened the curtains over the room’s sole window.
“Please, don’t,” she said.
Spurr glanced back at her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands on her knees. “I’d like it as dark as possible.”
Spurr closed the curtains with a sigh and turned to her. “I’ll fetch up some food.”
She merely looked at him, downturning her mouth in a remonstration.
“You gotta eat something.”
“Is my son eating something?”
Even with the casual, gentle way she’d said it, the retort was like a hard slap across his face. What did you say to something like that? Spurr merely walked to her, placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezed it gently, then walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. Behind the door, he heard the bedsprings sigh.
Spurr walked downstairs to see that the half-breed had gone, taking his gear with him, leaving his empty glass on the table. The lawman bellied up to the bar on which Della was laying out a game of solitaire. She’d popped the cork on a fresh bottle and set a glass beside it. Spurr splashed whiskey into it and threw it back.
“You got a safe place you can go? A cellar or somethin’?”
She looked up at him from her game, a sad, fearful cast to her gaze. “They won’t bother me. They know I’m the only watering hole around.”
Spurr refilled his glass. “They got their tails in knots, Della. More so than usual.” He threw back the shot, set the glass back down on the bar, and grabbed his rifle. “Best find a place to take cover. I’ll be atop the Wind River, should have a good vantage from up there.”
“Spurr, are you tryin’ to get yourself killed?” Della straightened and crossed her arms on her breasts. “Ain’t no one here to mourn a fool.”
He racked a shell into his Winchester’s chamber, off cocked the hammer, and glanced at Yakima Henry’s beer glass. “Where’d the half-breed go?”
Della hiked a shoulder. “Who knows where they go? Just a drifter. Been through here before; he’ll likely ride through again.” A strange, pensive, faintly longing expression shaped itself around her blue eyes and her red mouth as she stared at the half-breed’s table. “A tumbleweed, that one.”
Spurr gave a wry snort and went out.