CHAPTER 20
Larsen walked across the saloon and accepted the mug of coffee from the bigger of the two lawmen. At least, he assumed they were lawmen. They were with the marshal’s service, anyway, though neither wore the customary moon and star of a deputy U.S. marshal.
“Thanks,” Larsen said.
The big man, whom the smaller, darker man called Pecos, said, “You sure you feel well enough to make that journey, Marshal?”
“I’m well enough.” Larsen himself wasn’t sure. But he was going to make the journey, all right.
Besides, what else did he have to do? He had nothing left here in Dry Fork. Nothing but ashes. His wife and his best friend were dead. He hadn’t seen Henry’s body, but he knew Henry was dead. The killers had bragged to him about their handiwork with knives, torturing the poor old man to death before they’d strolled over to Larsen’s house, jumped him, dragged poor Tiffanie inside, and . . .
He squeezed his eyes closed.
The big, blue-eyed man with long, thin gray-blond hair smiled warmly and squeezed his arm. “Why don’t you sit down?” He glanced at the table he’d been occupying with the other man he’d heard the bigger man call Slash. “That old snake don’t bite. Leastways, his fangs are so dull it don’t hurt much.”
Larsen turned to the table and sat down in a chair across from the man called Slash. Slash stretched his right arm across the table, offering Larsen his open hand. “James Braddock. That big drink of foul-tasting water is Melvin Baker.”
Larsen frowned, puzzled. “I thought I heard . . .”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Slash said. “In a past life I was known as Slash and he was known as Pecos, and I’ll be damned if we can get used to callin’ each other by our straight-and-narrow names.”
Larsen stared down at his coffee, mentally perusing the wanted dodgers filed in his office. “Slash . . . Braddock,” he muttered. As two particular circulars clarified in his mind’s eyes, he glanced first at the man sitting across from him and the bigger man still standing by the potbelly stove. “Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid . . . ?”
Slash grimaced, cut a quick look at Pecos. “Yeah, that’s us, all right. I reckon our reputations still precede us, partner.”
Larsen heard himself give an amused snort in spite of his mental and physical torment. “Why, I used to read about your exploits in magazines and dime novels . . . back when I was a kid.”
“Whoa, now,” Pecos said, holding up the hand that wasn’t holding his coffee mug. “That’ll be enough of that. If you ain’t careful, you’re gonna go an’ make Slash an’ I feel old.” He gave a snort of his own and sipped his coffee.
“You’re going to go and make Slash and me feel old,” Jenny corrected the big ex-cutthroat as she came out of the kitchen with two steaming plates in her hands.
Slash chuckled.
“Doggone it,” Pecos said. “I thought I had it right that time!” He flushed as he took another sip of his coffee.
“Here’s breakfast,” Jenny said. “Mr. Carlisle kept a well-stocked kitchen.” She set a plate down in front of Slash and one at the end of the table nearest Pecos. Turning to Larsen, she said, “I’m glad to see you’re up and around, Marshal Larsen. I’ll bring you a plate right away. I made plenty.”
Larsen removed his hat, dropped it on the table near his coffee. “Please don’t call me ‘Marshal’ no more, Miss Jenny,” the young man said with a weary sigh. “How can a man be marshal of a town that don’t even exist anymore?”
Jenny drew her mouth corners down and nodded. Tears glazed her eyes. She drew a breath, suppressing her emotion, and turned and headed into the kitchen. “Just the same, I’ll fetch you a plate.”
“I’m really not hungry,” Larsen said to her back.
“You have to eat.” Jenny continued into the kitchen.
She brought the plate out a few minutes later and set it down in front of the grieving lawman. “Eat as much as you can.”
“All right.” Larsen looked up at the young woman, whose face was badly bruised, one eye partly swollen. His heart ached for her. He knew what she’d been through. She was lucky to be alive. “How ’bout you, Jenny? How are you doing?”
She stood by his chair, her hand on the back of it, leaning toward him. She cast her gaze out the window, and a flush of rage rose into her cheeks. “About as well as I can. I’m so sorry about Tiffanie, Glenn. She loved you so very much.”
“Yeah,” Larsen said, choking back a sob and staring down at his plate as a fresh wave of emotion threatened to swamp him. “Well . . . she’s gone. And I’m gonna make sure those three dogs get to Denver. I’ll be riding along with”—he glanced over at the two ex-cutthroats just then finishing their plates—“Slash and Pecos. Just to be sure,” he added. “I just have to make sure they hang for what they did to Tiffanie and you and Henry and all the rest of the town.”
Jenny nodded. “I understand. I’m coming, too.”
Larsen frowned. “You are?”
She shrugged. “Can’t stay here. I came from Denver. My father and mother are dead, and my sister and brothers have moved on, but it’s the only place I have to go to. They have some private girls’ schools there. I figure maybe I can get a job there.”
“Are you . . . are you sure you can . . . ride?” he hesitated to ask her.
She drew a calming breath. “I can ride. Just a little sore is all. But I can ride. I have to.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out with . . . with . . . well . . .”
The young teacher shook her head quickly. “The less said about that situation, the better.” She glanced at Slash and Pecos. “I’ll fill a couple of grub sacks for the trail.”
“You best eat, too, darlin’,” Slash said.
She scowled down at Larsen’s plate. So far, he’d only managed to break the yoke on one of his eggs resting on a pile of nicely browned potatoes. “I don’t have much more of an appetite than the mar—er . . . I mean, Glenn . . . does, I’m afraid.”
She swung around and disappeared back into the kitchen. Larsen figured she was mostly wanting to keep busy, so she didn’t ruminate on what had happened. He understood. Maybe that’s what he in part was doing, as well.
Larsen forked some egg and potato into his mouth. He swallowed. He was sure it tasted good, but he couldn’t detect any taste at all. It was a small bite of food, but it settled in his belly like poison. He tossed his fork down onto the plate, slid his chair back, and rose from the table.
“You should eat,” Pecos told him over the steaming rim of his coffee mug. “Gonna be a long ride.”
Larsen grimaced, shook his head. “My, uh . . . my deputy . . . ?”
“We left him in your office,” Slash said a little guiltily. “With another man. We figured if we started buryin’ folks, we’d be here forever ”
“I understand. It’s his gun I want.”
Larsen set his hat on his head and strode across the room and out through the batwings. He stopped at the top of the porch steps and stared at the jail wagon parked on the street before Carlisle’s. He looked at the killers. Sitting back against the jail wagon’s far barred wall, two stared back at him. Hell-Raisin’ Frank Beecher appeared asleep, head down, chin against his chest. Chaney elbowed him, and Beecher raised his head.
All three gazed in silence at the town marshal, whom they’d beaten, whose wife they’d ravaged most brutally, whose citizens they’d terrorized and butchered . . . whose town they’d burned. They stared at him without expression, their eyes flat and dull. They could have been three dogs or wildcats imprisoned over there in that wagon. Not the least bit of shame. But, then, there was nothing more savage than a savage man. That was a breed all unto itself....
Larsen walked down the porch steps. He turned east and angled across the street, passing the burned-out hulks of buildings, the sodden piles of ash and charred wood. His boots made sucking sounds in the mud. He approached the fire-scorched stone building that housed his office. He paused in front of the door, steeling himself. He could already smell the sickly sweet stench of death. His guts twisted.
Grimacing, he drew a deep breath and pushed through the door.
He stopped just inside and looked around. Eddie Black lay belly down a few feet inside the office. His throat had been cut. He lay in a large dark red pool of his own semidried blood. Two broken plates littered the floor. The food was gone. Apparently, the killers had taken time to eat their dinner meals—probably while they’d tortured Two Whistles. Henry lay just beyond him, near Larsen’s overturned chair. The poor old half-breed was covered in blood. They’d cut him to ribbons, torturing him slowly before they’d finally slit his throat.
Henry lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. An expression of incomprehensible pain and terror still shaped itself on his mouth. The death stench lay thick and heavy.
“Jesus.”
Larsen hurried forward, stepped around Eddie Black’s blood. Quickly, Larsen removed the holstered Colt Lightning and cartridge belt from around Two Whistles’s waist. He cinched it around his own waist, then walked over to the gun cabinet on the far wall. Two Winchester carbines remained in the rack, the chain over which had been unlocked and removed by the killers. They’d taken back their own revolvers and rifles, which Larsen had hauled out of Carlisle’s after he and Two Whistles had jailed Chaney and the other two outlaws. Larsen grabbed one of the carbines. He plucked a box of .44 cartridges from the bottom drawer of his desk, and stepped over his deputy and around Eddie Black as he made his way back to the door.
He stopped and turned back to the dead men. He considered a burial, but nixed the idea. The ground was too wet. It would take too long. Besides, he didn’t think he was physically capable. The beating had taken a lot out of him and left him with miserably aching ribs. The elements and the predators would have to suffice for Henry and Eddie Black. Larsen really didn’t see much difference, anyway.
Worms or coyotes?
The erosion of time and the elements would have to suffice. As for Tiffanie, she’d been consumed by the fires that had leveled their house. There was nothing left of her to bury or to be desecrated by the carrion-eaters.
His stomach churning against the stench and the grisly sight inside the office, Larsen hurried out the door. He stopped and drew a deep breath, then another and another. He loaded the carbine from the cartridge box, jacked one into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and lowered the rifle to his side.
He walked back toward Carlisle’s, grimacing at the ache in his ribs. He hoped he could sit a saddle. He would have to. He couldn’t stay here. Besides, he owed it to Tiffanie and Henry to make sure their killings were avenged. He wanted to see Chaney, Black Pot, and Beecher hang from the neck until they were dead. Somehow, he had a feeling that when he watched them die, Tiffanie and Henry would rest a little easier.
He was nearly to Carlisle’s front steps when he stopped and turned toward the jail wagon. He’d sensed the killers’ eyes on him. He hadn’t been imagining it. All three stared at him through the bars. He’d hoped they’d at least have those blank looks again. He’d hoped they wouldn’t be smiling. But that’s what they were doing, all right.
They were smiling at him. Mocking him. Mocking his pain and his grief over his wife and his best friend’s killings.
It was too much for Larsen to suppress. The anger was overwhelming.
He dropped the carbine and the cartridge box, and hardening his jaws, he turned and strode toward the wagon. His pulse throbbed in his knees. He clenched his fists at his sides until he thought the knuckles would burst through the skin. He kept seeing his burned house all but leveled to nothing but black ashes. He kept seeing Henry lying butchered in the office. He kept hearing Tiffanie’s screams . . . her wails . . . her pleas for help that was not going to come . . .
He heard the killers’ laughter as they’d disrespected and murdered her.
And he saw growing larger before him, as he approached the barred wagon, the faces of the killers curling their lips and narrowing their eyes at him. Making light of him and of what they had done.
As Larsen came to a stop six feet from the wagon, a vague unease passed over the killers’ eyes. Chaney was the only one with a faint smile still curling one side of his mouth. And now the outlaw’s mouth straightened as the dark-eyed devil known as Black Pot elbowed him, alerting the gang leader to possible trouble. They each in turn glanced at the Colt Lightning holstered in the black leather holster on Larsen’s right leg.
“What were you smiling about?” he choked out through a knot of tightly bound emotion residing just south of his vocal cords. He had his chin down, eyes wide, and he could feel several veins throbbing in his forehead.
“What’s that?” asked Frank Beecher.
“You heard me,” Larsen said. “What were you smiling about?”
He shuttled his gaze back and forth across them. All three stared back at him, their eyes now stonily defiant. Finally, Chaney let out a chuckle. He turned to grin at Black Pot, who smiled then, too.
Larsen couldn’t help himself. Suddenly, Two Whistles’s Colt was in his hand. He raised it, hearing the three clicks as his thumb drew the hammer back. His hand shook. He steadied it with the other one, dripped his chin again, and narrowed one eye as he aimed down the barrel at Chaney’s head.
“Hold on now!” Chaney said, holding up his hands, palms out. “Just hold on, now, Marshal.” He looked around Larsen toward Carlisle’s and said, “Trouble over here! You two better get this young marshal back on his leash. He’s actin’ crazy!”
Larsen heard two sets of footsteps and knew the two former outlaws, Braddock and Baker, were moving toward him.
“I have to do it,” Larsen yelled at the two men moving toward him from behind, squeezing the revolver so tightly he could hear the handle cracking. “I can’t help myself! Why should they live after what they did to my wife . . . to Henry . . . ?”
Braddock moved up on his left and stopped.
Baker moved up on his right and stopped.
Mildly, Braddock said, “You do what you have to.”