SHERIFF JEDEDIAH GIBBON rode his gray gelding around a trail bend and past a skeletal cottonwood copse. He was nearing the scraggly little village of Canaan, Dakota Territory.
It was a clear, cold day. Frost limned the trees, the sky was cobalt blue, and the bright sun felt like sharp sand in Gibbon’s eyes.
The sheriff was chilled to the bone and saddle weary. His buffalo coat and the scarf his wife had knitted, which he’d wrapped over his Stetson and tied under his chin, offered as much warmth as a man could ask for.
But nothing kept the ten-below cold from your bowels on a thirty-mile round-trip ride through snow that often rose to your horse’s pecker. The small bundles of hay Gibbon had tied to his stirrups had kept his feet warm for a few miles, but he hadn’t felt his toes in his boots for over two hours now.
He’d never been so happy to round the last bend in the freight road and see the two dozen tar-paper shacks and clapboard store fronts of Canaan slide out before him. Noticing the black coal smoke gushing from the brick chimney over the Sundowner Saloon, Gibbon headed that way.
Halting his horse before the raised boardwalk, he dismounted gently on his frozen feet, giving a tired groan. When he had two boots solidly beneath him, he turned to regard Miller’s Feed Barn across the street. Angus Miller was out in
the paddock, forking hay to a string of shaggy Percherons. His black-and-white collie lay close by, showing the horses its teeth.
Gibbon called to the man and indicated his horse. Miller nodded. Then Gibbon threw his reins over the tie rail, climbed the porch steps with painful deliberation, wincing and using the railing, and entered the saloon.
“Close the damn door,” someone yelled. “You born in a barn?”
Gibbon closed the door and peered into the cave-like dark as his eyes adjusted from the bright sun. He worked his nose, sniffing. It never ceased to amaze him how horrible the place always smelled.
“Where you keepin’ the bear?” he growled. “I can smell him, but I can’t see him.”
“How ya doin’, Jed?” the proprietor, Monty Fisk, asked.
Fisk, who doubled as a barber, was shaving a local rancher in the barber chair near the big coal stove that sat, tall as a good-sized man, in the middle of the room. As was customary during cold snaps, everyone in the place had gravitated toward the stove. A fine soot hung in the air.
Behind the stove, several rough-looking, winter-weary cowboys sat around a table playing high-five. Before it, several businessmen and ranchers had gathered to gas with the boys. A coffeepot, tin cups, and several whiskey glasses sat before them.
“Been warmer,” Gibbon said. “Earl, if you give me your spot there by the stove, I won’t tell your wife about the fourteen-year-old soiled dove you’ve been diddling over in Wild Rose.”
Earl jerked his gaze at Gibbon outraged. “Who told you that!”
“Oh, hell, Earl—everyone knows but Stella, and she’s bound to find out sooner or later.”
“And when she does …” remarked one of the cowboys beyond the stove, whistling.
As laughter erupted around the saloon, Earl Watson angrily grabbed his glass and headed for a vacant chair away from the stove. Gibbon eased into his place, removed his gloves, and began pulling off his boots.
When he was working on the second high-topped Wellington, Fisk said, “Trouble out to the Rinski place, eh, Jed?”
“I’ll say.”
“What kind of trouble?” the man in the barber’s chair wanted to know. His name was Verlyn Thornberg, and he owned the Circle T ranch south of town. It was the largest spread in the county.
Gibbon’s second boot came off suddenly, nearly knocking him from his chair. He dropped the boot and went to work on his socks.
“You don’t really want to know, Verlyn. It’ll just irritate your kidney infection.”
“If it’s rustlers, I have a right to know, and so do the other ranchers in the basin.”
“It ain’t rustlers.”
“What, then?”
Gibbon dropped his socks over his boots and stuck both feet out to the warmth pulsing from the red-hot stove. The feet were white as porcelain, the hard, shell-like nails a sickly yellow-blue, but Gibbon thought he was starting to get some feeling back. “Ay-yi-yi, that feels good … . Give me a whiskey sling, will you, Monty?”
“Comin’ right up, Jed.”
“What’s the problem out at Rinski’s?” Thornberg persisted.
He was a thin man with a narrow, gloomy face. His hair was reddish brown, like his skin, and appeared equally faded
by the wind and sun. The grim line of his mouth showed under his thin yellow mustache.
Gibbon had never liked Thornberg. Back during the Old Trouble, as everyone called it, and against Gibbon’s direct orders, Thornberg had tried to organize the small ranchers against the big outfit trying to take over the Canaan Bench. The last thing Gibbon had wanted was an all-out land war. Wagging his nose at the sheriff, Thornberg went about his plans, and there hadn’t been anything Gibbon could do about it. The Double X outfit was attacking the small ranchers and stealing their beef, after all. If Gibbon had charged Thornberg with anything, he would have been run out of town on a long, greased pole.
Thornberg looked at the sheriff now with dark expectancy. The left half of his face was still lathered with shave cream; Fisk had stopped to fix Gibbon’s drink.
Everyone was looking at Gibbon. He waited until the toddy was in his hand. He sipped it, said over the steam rising from the surface of the deliciously warming brew, “Someone killed Rinski’s hired man.”
“Oh, that’s all,” chuffed one of the cowboys behind the stove, going back to his high-five.
“That sombitch was bound to get it from someone sooner or later,” said the cowboy sitting next to him.
“No doubt,” Gibbon said, sipping the toddy. He grew thoughtful and stared at the stove.
“That it?” Thornberg said. “Did Jack Thom just get caught hornswogglin’ the wrong rough, or do we have a problem?”
Fisk pulled his razor back from Thornberg’s throat and said, “Hold still now, Verlyn, or I’m liable to carve out your Adam’s apple.”
Gibbon looked at Thornberg and sighed. He knew there was no point in trying to keep it a secret. It would be all over the country in a few days. “Thom was screwin’ his boss’s
daughter when he bought it from two masked men with scatterguns.”
“Masked gunmen?” Thornberg said.
“That’s right.”
“Double X men.”
“We don’t know that,” Gibbon warned.
“No, we don’t,” Thornberg retorted. “But who else around here has sent out masked riders in the past five years?” To the barber, he said, “Finish me up now, Monty, I gotta go,” and to the men behind the stove: “Lou, Grady—get your horses.”
“Where you goin’?” Gibbon said.
“Home to count my cattle,” Thornberg said. “And I’m gonna send out some boys to see if I got any men left in my line shacks—alive, that is!”
Gibbon shook his head and regarded the men with gravity. “I stopped at several places on my way back, and no one had lost any men or cattle. No fences had been cut, and nothin’s been burned. There’s no reason to believe it was Magnusson’s men who killed Jack Thom. So just simmer yourself down now, Verlyn!”
“That’s what you said last summer when old Lincoln Fairchild was found dead in his cabin, and when that Pittsburgh schoolteacher and his family were found butchered on their farm over by Badger Lake!”
“Those were highwaymen,” Gibbon said. “They were robbed.”
“Ah, horseshit! That was King Magnusson sendin’ us a message: Get out or get greased!”
“Now hold your horses, Thornberg!”
Thornberg swept the barber’s smock away and bounded out of the chair and over to Gibbon’s table in two fluid swings of his long legs. He planted his fists on the table. His eyes
were so wide that Gibbon could see nearly as much white as iris.
“Listen, you old fossil. The message might have been too subtle for you, but it wasn’t too subtle for me. When they get goin’ again like they got goin’ five years ago, there’s going to be hell to pay. And you know who they’re gonna hit hardest as well as I do. They’re gonna hit me. And me and my boys are the only one’s with guts enough to do anything about it. So just sit there and enjoy your booze. You just sit there all winter long and warm your big feet and drink yourself into a good warm haze—just like you did last time we had trouble. But me, I’m gonna stop trouble in its tracks … settle this thing the way it should’ve been settled five years ago.”
Gibbon coolly watched the man push himself up from the table, take his ten-gallon Stetson from one of his riders, don it, and struggle into his mackinaw. The three men walked out into the bright sunlight, letting in a frigid draft, and slammed the door behind them.
Gibbon stared into his drink.
Monty Fisk quietly broke the silence. “None of us believes any of that horseshit, Jed.”
Gibbon looked at him, hating the patronizing air with which the barber regarded him. The two remaining cowboys behind the stove just stared at their cards. He didn’t want to look at the businessmen sitting around him. He knew they wore the same looks as Fisk.
“Oh, shut the fuck up, will ya, Monty!” Gibbon barked suddenly. “What does a man have to do to get a drink around here?”
GIBBON SAT BAREFOOT before the fire, in his bulky buffalo coat, and sipped two more toddies. The warmth of the stove
conjured summer afternoons when he was a boy, fishing and napping along the creek behind the barn, the July sun beating down, branding his eyelids. Not a care in the world.
Back then, only bluegills sucking the corn on his hook brought him back from his dreaming. Now it was Monty Fisk calling from across the room.
“Jed, it’s gettin’ late. Go on home before Martha has to send a boy for ya.”
Gibbon jerked up from his reverie, realizing a sappy grin had basted his face. He set his mug down on the table, ran his hand down his bristly cheeks, and yawned. “I reckon I better head over to the train station. The four-ten must be due.”
“Go on home and quit feelin’ sorry for yourself,” Fisk scolded. All the other customers had left without Gibbon realizing, and Fisk was sweeping sawdust as he puffed a nickel cigar.
Pulling his hot socks on, Gibbon said, “If it wasn’t for me, feelin’ sorry for myself, you’d go out of business. Give me a plug o’ that Spearhead’s for the road, and add it to my bill. I get paid next week.”
When he’d stomped into his boots and pulled his gloves on, he tied his scarf over his hat, went out, and headed for the depot on the other end of town.
It was early winter twilight, and the first stars were impossibly bright. The silhouettes of supply-laden sleighs slid past, their teams crunching the packed snow beneath them. Gibbon kept to the boardwalks, glancing through windows at the lantern-lit stores, and shuffled up the shoveled cobblestone platform on which the red-brick station house sat, smoke puffing from its chimney.
He sat on a bench inside, close to the fire, exchanging platitudes with the agent-telegrapher, a half-breed who slept on a cot in the primitive office. The four-ten thundered in,
twenty minutes late. Gibbon was walking out to greet it as a big-boned kid with red hair dumped the mail pouch in a battered leather buggy.
“Afternoon, Sheriff.”
“Afternoon, Teddy. How’s your pa?”
“He’s gettin’ some feelin’ back in his hands, but Doc Hall doesn’t think he’ll ever be right in his head again.”
“That’s too bad. Give him my best, will ya?”
“Sure will. See ya Thursday.”
Five minutes later, the conductor, shrouded in soot and steam, yelled, “All aboard!”—though no one seemed to be getting on—and the train thundered off in a cloud of hot steam, which bathed the sheriff and pleasantly sucked the cold breath from his lungs.
When the train was gone, leaving only snakes of steam curling over the cobbles, Gibbon peered up the platform. It was empty. Apparently no one had gotten off, which was just fine with Gibbon. Not having to confront miscreants—usually drunk, jobless cowboys looking for a place to winter—made the sheriff’s job all the easier. He could go home now, eat a hot supper, and crawl into bed with Martha and his new Police Gazette.
“Sure turned cold early this year.” It was the station agent, trying to drag a large crate stamped MERCANTILE across the snowy cobbles, and grunting with the effort.
“For Pete’s sake, let me help you there, Henry,” Gibbon said, walking over, crouching down, and trying to get a good hold on the freight carton. “On three, let’s lift the son of a bitch. One, two …”
“One of you amigos have a light?”
The request came out of nowhere, in Spanish-accented English. It startled Gibbon and the station agent, who suddenly stopped what they were doing and looked up. Gibbon saw he’d been wrong about no one getting off the train. The man
standing before him was certainly not from around here.
He was a tall, slender man in a round-brimmed black hat. He wore a coat like none Gibbon had ever seen before. It appeared to be wolf fur. Shiny and gray-black, it had a high collar that nearly covered the man’s ears, and it boasted silver buttons big as ’dobe dollars.
Squatting there at the man’s knees, Gibbon and the agent looked at each other, speechless. Finally, the agent straightened, brushing his hands on his trousers, and reached into his shirt pocket for a matchbox. He produced a lucifer and scraped it against the box. The man stuck a thin black cigar between his lips and leaned toward the flame, which the agent cupped, looking sheepish.
When the man got a good draw, he tipped his head back in a cloud of smoke. “Gracias, señor.” The man’s voice was deep and resonant, indicating a well of self-assured power.
Gibbon didn’t know what to make of the man. He was no cowboy, that was for sure. What was a dandy greaser doing in Dakota in the middle of a butt-ripping winter? Gibbon wanted to ask. But the man’s presence rendered the sheriff’s words stillborn on his tongue.
“Now I have a question for you,” the man said. “Where can a weary traveler find himself a hot bath and some girls to go with it?” His emotionless blue eyes—out of place in the Hispanic face with its high, flat cheekbones and aquiline nose—slid between Gibbon and the station agent.
After what seemed several seconds, Gibbon cleared his throat, but it was the agent who spoke. “Well … I reckon you can probably find both up to the Powder Horn, on the west end of town … wouldn’t you say, Jed?”
Gibbon nodded, finding his tongue. “The Powder Horn—that’s right, up the street, west end of town.” He squinted at the man and took a breath, at last finding the question he wanted to ask. But before he could get it out, the man nodded
graciously, spread his waxed mustache in a thin smile, and said, “Much obliged, señors.” Then he hefted his baggage and sauntered down the platform, head cocked to one side, puffing smoke.
Watching him, Gibbon noticed he carried a silver-mounted saddle on his shoulder, balanced there as though it were no burden at all. There was a war bag looped over the horn. In the man’s other hand he carried a scabbard containing a rifle. From its size and length, Gibbon concluded it was no squirrel gun.
“Well, what in the hell do you make of that?” the agent said, still looking after the man.
Gibbon said nothing. He watched the man disappear around the corner of the station house, recalling the man’s extraordinary face. He’d seen it before … somewhere. He knew he had. You don’t forget a face like that.
But where?
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Gibbon mumbled, running a gloved hand along his chin. “I’ll see ya, Henry,” he added absently.
Forgetting he’d been about to help the agent with the crate, he opened the depot building’s doors and walked through the waiting area and out the other side. He cast his gaze up the street. It was getting too dark to see much, but he could make out the silver glint of the Mexican saddle as the man carried it up the boardwalk.
Gibbon considered catching up with the man and asking him point-blank where he’d seen him before, but decided against it. There was something in the stranger’s demeanor that told Gibbon you didn’t pry—unless you were Wyatt Earp or Bill Tilighman, that is, and were faster on the draw than Jedediah Gibbon.
Getting an idea, Gibbon walked over to the jail, which sat next to the livery barn and across the street from the Sundowner.
It was so cold in the place that Gibbon’s cup of coffee, abandoned this morning when he was called out to the Rinski place, had frozen solid.
But Gibbon didn’t light a fire. He didn’t plan to be here long. Martha was no doubt waiting supper for him.
He lit a hurricane lamp and set it on his desk before rummaging around in a drawer and tossing a bundle of old, yellowed wanted dodgers on his scarred desktop. He sat down and thumbed through the posters, carefully considering the rough sketch on each. Five minutes after he’d started, one caught his eye.
The likeness was so poor it was hard to be sure, but the description of the man cinched it: tall, slender Mexican with blue eyes and handlebar mustache. The man’s name was José Luis del Toro, wanted for multiple murders in Texas and New Mexico. He was described as a cold-blooded gun for hire, and extremely deadly.
Gibbon stared at the picture for several minutes, feeling a chill in his loins. So Verlyn Thornberg had been right. Something was going on. One of the ranchers in the area had hired a gunman.
Gibbon scowled at the sketch of José Luis del Toro, whose very name sounded like death. It made Gibbon feel like the inadequate old coward everyone thought he was.
“Shit,” he said with a grunt.
If the man who’d gotten off the train really was Del Toro, the Old Trouble was back with a vengeance. And it was Gibbon’s job to do something about it.
He sat back in his chair and felt the old, lonely fear wash over him once again.