Carroll
A twelve-inch plank formed a sorry bridge across the street of muck, its sagging middle submerged beneath a brown lake so that the ends curved up like pieces of two planks. The party started across single file with the marshal in front. The crowd that had gathered outside the barbershop watched them without following. They looked like a parade in mufti. The butcher was still in his doorway. The dog had moved with the sun to another part of the boardwalk.
"You make it a practice to leave your prisoners unguarded?" inquired St. John when they were in front of the office. He watched the peace officer, whose name was Kendall, sorting through the keys on his ring.
"My one and only deputy's home with the ague. And you ain't seen our jail."
The air in the office was sour with the memory of boiled coffee, old cigars, and older sweat. The marshal led the way through the door in back and up a steep flight of narrow, squeaking stairs to four cells facing each other across a cramped aisle. Solid oak clunked under their footsteps. The Menéndezes had remained outside as usual; a series of beeps out front revealed that they had discovered the Reo's horn.
The lone prisoner was an old man with short white whiskers and long hair hanging over his ears from a fringe around his naked scalp. He was sitting on the edge of his iron cot with one boot off and a sock on his hand, sourly contemplating his fingers poking through ragged holes in the toe. The stale dirty smell of the blackened wool hung in the atmosphere. There were only two windows on that floor, very small and very high up.
"Sure wish you'd give me that needle, Marshal," he said without looking up.
"And let you stick a vein? Besides, who's going to see the holes if you keep your boots on? You're long past whoring age."
"If I thought that, I'd of stuck myself long before this. That ain't it, though. I seen this pitcher once of Bob Dalton after he got hisseif shot to pieces in Coffeyville. His boots was off and his toes was sticking through a hole in his sock. I don't mind winding up dead, but I sure don't welcome the idee of someone taking a pitcher of me with my bare toes showing."
"Wouldn't be so bad if you washed them once in a while. I brung visitors."
"Seen 'em. Don't know a one of 'em." He turned the sock inside out and pulled it back on his foot. It was just as black on that side.
"He don't know you," the marshal told St. John.
"I heard. What's your name, Dad?"
"It ain't Dad." He stamped on his boot. There was a crust of dried mud on the rundown heel.
"Name on the bill of sale was L. C. Wood." Kendall clanked the keys idly in his coat pocket. It was a brown pinstriped suitcoat that had matched his vest and trousers before it began to fade. He wore a brown fedora with a brown silk band.
"Well, Mr. L. C. Wood," said St. John, "you mind telling me where you got those horses you were selling?"
“Done answered that one.” Glancing up at the marshal: "Anything yet from Pueblo?"
Kendall shook his head. "Appears your Mr. Wilder is a hard man to get hold of. If he exists."
St. John said, "He exists. This bunch wouldn't be dumb enough to use stolen horses on a train robbery. Right, Mr. L. C. Wood?"
The old man made a perverse suggestion and stretched out on the cot, crossing his cracked boots. Five seconds later he was snoring. He hadn't looked at St. John once.
"We'll take him off your hands," the latter told Kendall.
The marshal looked apologetic. "I got to have something, a warrant or something."
St. John nudged Rawlings. "Hand me one of those John Does."
The Pinkerton produced a flat wallet and took out a paper folded lengthwise. St. John accepted it and gave it to the marshal, who unfolded it, reading it at arm's length.
"He'll need a horse," said the old lawman. "A good one, but not too fast. In case he breaks."
Kendall returned the warrant. "Talk to Carl at the livery stable. Tell him I sent you. If you don't, he might try to stick you with one of them beat-down animals the old man brung in."
"Do it," St. John told Edwards and counted out fifty dollars from a roll into the reformed outlaw's outstretched palm. Kendall snorted.
"Carl ain't never let a horse go for fifty bucks yet."
"Carl ain't never done business with me." Edwards grinned and left while the marshal was looking for the key to the cell.
They jostled him up, ratcheted on a new pair of handcuffs with a spring lock provided by the Pinkerton, and escorted him, sleep-drunk and stiff from the chalk in his joints, downstairs to the office. While the square-built man in charge read and signed the receipt, the prisoner raised his shackled hands to his face and rubbed vigorously, the chain jingling, arranging his senses by main will. The Indian was at the door and the other two, the little preacher and the bearded detective, stood on either side of him.
Carroll had found himself in this position several time before. Though none of the young squirts he had been riding with believed it, he had known Frank and Jesse and Bob and Cole and the rest, had thawed the frostbite out of his bare feet next to Jesse's at the campfire, had smelled their horses' manure and they his, had breathed the rotten-egg stench of spent black powder in Gallatin and Corydon and at the fairgrounds in Kansas City, where that little girl had come running out from nowhere as they were leaving and he hadn't time to turn his horse. Now and then he still woke up with her screams buzzing in his skull. His first arrest had occurred soon after, but he had managed to wriggle out of his bonds and flee on foot while the posse was camped and even the man on watch had fallen asleep. He'd had luck in those days.
Then there were the bonds from which he had not escaped. A year in Yankton for possession of a running iron. Six months on a Union Pacific work detail for attempting to drive Texas cattle over the quarantine line. Two years and two months in the Missouri State Penitentiary for receiving stolen horses, which had led to his meeting Gentleman John Bitsko, the Kissing Bandit. (He wondered if John had got his wire.) Forty-four months in captivity had taught him patience, but more important, they had taught him to watch for his opportunity and throw his noose over it as it galloped past.
They were waiting for the tall one to come back with a horse for him. Outside the window two Mexicans with bandoleers under their coats were fooling around with the marshal's motorcar, one in the driver's seat wrenching the steering wheel left and right, the other standing on the running board, gesturing for him to slide over, that it was his turn. The automobile sagged under his weight.
"George, get them away from that thing before they bust it will ya'" asked the man in charge.
The Indian stepped outside, and Carroll started tingling. A warm sensation, it started in his toes, the toes he didn't want anyone taking pictures of, and crept up his legs to his stomach, chest, and head, driving the rheumatism before it like paste from a foil tube. He had always said that a man takes courage from his feet, not his heart, which was another reason why he believed in treating them with respect. He braced himself.
The Mexicans were fighting over the steering wheel when George reached them. One of them bumped the shifting cane and the vehicle started rolling backward, down the gentle decline in front of the office. The man on the running board jumped off. The car picked up speed. George grasped the edge of the frame and tried to brace himself, his boots clawing for traction on the slimy street surface. Kendall cursed and said the car was town property. The leader said, "Son of a bitch," and sent the Pinkerton out to help. He and the marshal watched from the door.
Carroll pivoted on his left foot, swinging his doubled fists sideways and up at the preacher's jaw. He undershot, missing bone but thumping neck muscle hard with the steel cuffs. While his victim was off balance he followed through with his shoulder, spilling him. The lawmen at the door were turning when he struck them with both shoulders and forced an opening between them. He bounded across the boardwalk, past the men grappling with the automobile, toward the startled horses hitched out front.
"Don't shoot, Testament!" St. John roared.
Pierce—hatless, hair in his eyes, scrambling to his feet—didn't hear him. The long Navy Colt was out of its holster and his finger closed on the trigger. Flame leapt from the barrel. The room throbbed. The plate-glass window shivered, fell in silence, its noise swallowed by the deafening aftershock. He fired again.
Carroll didn't hear the second shot. He lay face down in the mud. The back of his coat smoldered.