CHAPTER ONE
“I send you out to investigate a murder and you bring me back a cat,” Sheriff Chance Hurd said.
“With all the rats we get in here, we need a cat,” Deputy Sheriff Dan Caine said.
“Rodent or human?”
“Both, but mainly rodent. I saw one in the cell the other day that if you whittled down to middlin’ size would still be as big as a hound dog.”
“Well, I guess the cat is kinda cute at that,” Hurd said, eyeing the calico that sat on his desk and studied him with fixed, glowing attention. The lawman sighed. “You feed it. Now, put the Kiowa back in his cell and make your report. The coffee is on the bile.”
“We’ll need the Kiowa when we go after Jenny Calthrop and the men who murdered her family,” Caine said.
“The Indian is a drunk,” Hurd said.
“Drunk or sober, he can follow a cold trail best I ever seen,” Caine said.
“Dan, we ain’t following no trails, cold or otherwise,” Hurd said. He was a big man with a comfortably round belly and heavy bags under expressive, and cold blue eyes that gave him a basilisk stare. He pointed a thick forefinger at his deputy. “We’re city. The Calthrop spread is Concho County and always was.”
Hurd’s chair scraped across the jailhouse’s rough pine floor as he rose and stepped to the stove. He took a couple of cups down from a shelf and poured steaming coffee into both. He handed one to Caine. “Fish says seven riders.”
“He thinks there were that many. He isn’t sure,” Caine said. “I saw the tracks, and I’m not sure either.”
“What did the Kiowa say?”
“He says seven, maybe eight.”
“Too many,” Hurd said.
“The Kiowa says that judging by her tracks, one of them was a woman, but I’m not sure of that either. But I read a dodger that said Clay Kyle runs with a woman,” Caine said.
“Black-Eyed Susan. Yeah, I know,” Hurd said. “She’s named for the prairie wildflower, or so they say. And she kills like a teased rattlesnake. I heard that too. But it wasn’t Clay Kyle done this crime. Get that out of your head. It’s too far west for him.”
“No matter. The sooner we form a posse the better,” Caine said. “So why the hell are we sitting here drinking coffee?”
“Like I said, we’re not going after them killers,” Hurd snapped. “And, like I already told you, it ain’t Clay Kyle an’ them, because he never, and I say never, rides west of the Brazos. Everybody knows that.”
“That’s not what old Fish Lee thinks,” Dan said. “Fish gets around, he talks to people, some of them lawmen and Rangers. He says there’s stories about a crazy man by the name of Loco Garrett who scalps women with long, blonde hair. He makes a pastime of it, you might say, and there’s a ten-thousand-dollar price on his head, dead or alive. Grace Calthrop was scalped . . . and Garrett runs with Clay Kyle.”
“There’s plenty of big windies told about Clay Kyle and his boys,” Hurd said. “Don’t believe all you hear.” The sheriff studied Dan Caine for a few moments and then said, “The county sheriff is living up Paint Rock way and I already sent him a wire. It’s his responsibility. Me and you, we got enough to contend with when the punchers come in on Friday nights.” He smiled. “Fright night, I call it.”
“Lucas Ward is nearly seventy years old,” Caine said. “He delivers warrants during the day and at night pulls padlocks on locked store doors. He’s not about to ride out after seven killers on a chase that could last weeks.”
“And that’s exactly why we’re staying put,” Hurd said. “If you and me was away from Main Street for weeks, Thunder Creek would become a wide-open town, and wide-open towns attract outlaws, gunmen, gamblers, fancy women, and all kinds of rannies on the make. The damned burg would fall into lawlessness and come apart at the seams.”
The sheriff’s statement was so absurd, so palpably false, that Caine smiled, his teeth white under his sweeping dragoon moustache. “Chance, look out the window, what do you see?”
“A town,” Hurd said. He was an inch taller than Caine’s lanky six feet, a heavy, joyless man with rough-cut black hair, long sideburns that flanked a spade-shaped beard, and a nose that had been broken several times, a relic of his wild, outlaw youth. He dressed like a respectable law clerk in a charcoal gray ditto suit and a wing collared shirt and blue tie. But he had none of a clerk’s sallowness, his weathered face being as dark and coppery as that of a Cheyenne dog soldier. On those few social occasions when he had to deal with out-of-town rowdies, he wore twin Colts carried in crossed gunbelts. It was not an affectation, but the mark of a shootist, a man to be reckoned with.
“Look at Main Street,” Caine said, turning in his chair to glance out the fly-specked window. “Three fair-sized frame houses, built in a rickety hodgepodge style, but painted white and shaded by wild oaks. The houses are surrounded by outbuildings and behind them two dozen tarpaper shacks that could fold up and blow away in a good wind. There’s Doan’s General Store that doubles as a saloon. Ma Lester’s Guest House and Restaurant for Respectable Christian Gentlemen, and Mike Sweet’s blacksmith shop with its steam hammer that he claims is the eighth wonder of the world. What else? Oh yeah, a rotting church with a spire and a cross on top but no preacher, a livery barn and corral, and a windmill with iron blades bitten into by rust. And all of this overlooking a scrubby, gravelly street throwing off clouds of dust that gets into everything. Oh, I forgot the Patterson stage that brings the mail. It visits once a month . . . if we’re lucky.”
Caine swung back and stared at Hurd. “After the law rides out of town, do you really think all those gunmen, outlaws, gamblers, and fancy women of yours are going to beat their feet in the direction of Thunder Creek, population ninety-seven? Hell, Chance, even the town’s name is a lie. It seldom thunders here, there ain’t even a creek, and half the folks are as poor as lizard-eating cats.”
“Poor but proud. There’s enough money out there to pay your twenty-a-month,” Hurd said.
“That’s three months in arrears,” Caine said. He waited to let that sink in, and then said, “Did I tell you about Nancy Calthrop’s wedding ring?”
Hurd rose, poured himself more coffee, and sat again. “No, you didn’t.”
“She was very proud of it. Showed it to me one time. She said it was a rose color made from a nugget of Black Hills gold that Tom bought from a Sioux Indian one time and inside the band it said “forever.”
“I’m glad she liked it . . . it being a wedding ring that was rose gold and said forever and all,” Hurd said.
“Somebody cut off Nancy’s finger to get that ring, and I bet right now he’s wearing it,” Caine said.
“Why are you telling me this?” Hurd said.
“Because I want to go after the feller who’s wearing that ring and hang him,” Caine said. “And I want the animal that scalped Grace Calthrop. And I want to rescue her sister Jenny. And, Chance. I want you to authorize a posse and I want you to do it right now. Time is a-wasting.”
Chance Hurd sat in silence and studied the younger man. Caine was in his early thirties. He was a good-looking man with jet black hair and eyebrows that were slightly too heavy for his lean face. He had a wide, expressive mouth and good teeth, and women, respectable and otherwise, liked him just fine. Dan Caine looked a man right in the eye, holding nothing back, and most times he had a stillness about him, a calm, but of the uncertain sort that had the brooding potential to suddenly burst into a moment of hellfire action. He seldom talked about himself, but Hurd knew that the young man had served three years in Huntsville for an attempted train robbery. He’d spent the first four months of his sentence in the penitentiary’s infirmary for a bullet wound to the chest he’d taken during the hold-up. At some point during that time, probably in the spring of 1880 according to most historians, he was befriended by John Wesley Hardin. Prison life had tempered Hardin’s wild ways and Wes convinced the young Caine to quit the outlaw trail and live by the law. Released early in the summer of 1882, Dan Caine drifted for a couple of years, doing whatever work he could find. He arrived in Montana in January 1884, the year the citizenry, irritated by the amount of crime in the Territory, appointed hundreds of vigilantes to enforce the law. Hard-eyed hemp posses dutifully strung up thirty-five cattle and horse thieves and an even dozen of just plain nuisances. Dan didn’t think Montana a good place to loiter, and in the fall of 1885, owning only his horse, saddle, rifle, Colt revolver, and the clothes he stood up in, he rode into Thunder Creek, missing his last six meals. Chance Hurd liked the tough, confident look of the young man and gave him a job as a twenty-a-month deputy sheriff. Caine made no secret of his past, but, having ridden the owlhoot trail himself a time or three, Hurd was willing to let bygones be bygones. That was three years ago, and now it looked as though their association was about to come to an end.
“Dan, you’re willing to go this alone, I can tell,” Hurd said. “Why?”
“Because I liked the Calthrops,” Caine said. “They were good people, kind, generous people, full of laughter and of life and the living of it. They didn’t deserve to be slaughtered the way they were and their oldest daughter taken. Now they lie in cold graves, all of them, and their killers run free, warm in the sunshine.”
“How the hell are you going to find a posse in Thunder Creek?” Hurd said. “You think about that?”
“Holt Peters and Frank Halder helped me bury the dead,” Caine said. “They’re willing to ride after the killers.”
Hurd made a strange, exasperated sound in his throat, then, “Peters is an orphan stock boy at the general store and Halder is a momma’s brat who wears spectacles because he can’t see worth a damn. As far as I know, neither of them have shot a gun in their lives.” The sheriff smiled. “That’s two. Go on . . .”
“Fish Lee says he’ll go if he can find a horse,” Caine said.
“An old man with the rheumatisms who’s half crazy with the gold fever,” Hurd said. “That’s three. Go on . . .”
Caine glanced at the railroad clock on the wall. “It’s gone two-thirty. Clint Cooley will be getting out of bed soon. He owes me a favor or two.”
“A washed-up gambler who drinks too much and is trying to outrun a losing streak,” Hurd said. “He’s in Thunder Creek because his back is to the wall, and he has nowhere else to run. Maybe that’s four, maybe it’s not. Go on . . .”
“Cooley is good with a gun,” Caine said. “That’s a point in his favor.”
“Sure, because he carries them fancy foreign revolvers; we heard that he’s been in a dozen shooting scrapes and killed five men,” Hurd said. “Only problem with that is that nobody can say where and when the killings happened. Me, I don’t think he’s gunned anybody. He just ain’t the type.”
Caine didn’t push it. Cooley was a man with his own dark secrets, and he’d never heard of him boast of killings. Wild talk always grew around lonely, unforthcoming men and meant nothing. This much Dan Caine did know . . . the ivory-handled, .44 caliber British Bulldog revolvers the gambler carried in a twin shoulder holster were worn from use. But how and when he’d used the pistols was a matter for speculation, as Hurd had just noted.
“The Kiowa makes five,” Caine said. “Yeah, I know he’s a drunk, and we believe he’s the one who killed Lem Jones behind the saloon that time, but he’s a tracker.”
“I never could pin that shooting on the Kiowa,” Hurd said. “It doesn’t take much evidence to hang an Indian, but it was like good ol’ Lem was shot by a damned ghost. No tracks, nothing.”
Caine smiled. “Now he is dead, he’s good ol’ Lem. When he was alive, he was a mean, sorry, wife-beating excuse for a man. He needed killing and hell, I sometimes took the notion to gun him myself.”
The sheriff sighed. “Lem cheated at cards and he was hell on blacks and Indians. Hated them both.” Then, “All right, round up your posse, Dan, but leave your badge right there on the desk. You ain’t going after them killers as a deputy sheriff of Thunder Creek.”
“Why?”
“Because what you’re doing is not authorized. Now put the badge on the desk like I said.”
Caine removed the nickel silver shield from his dark blue shirtfront and laid it in front of Hurd. “Now what am I?” he said.
“Now what are you? As of this moment, Dan, you’re no longer a lawman but a vigilante . . . and until a few minutes ago I’d have thought that as likely as hearing the word love in a Wichita whorehouse. A man can sure be wrong about some things, huh?”
Caine stepped across the floor to a shelf that held a number of Texas law books, three novels by Mr. Dickens, an unthumbed Bible, and two quarto volumes of Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, the late property of a preacher who’d taken over the church and died a week later of apoplexy.
Caine flicked his way through the pages until he reached V, flicked some more, and then said, “Vigilante. It says what I am right here.”
“Read it.”
“‘A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority,’” Caine said. He paused and then said, “This part is important because it explains why folks like me do what we do. It says here, ‘without legal authority’ ”—then louder—“‘typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate. ’”
Hurd nodded. “Now you know what you are and what I am.” He picked up the badge, opened his desk drawer, dropped it inside, and then slammed the drawer shut. “Good luck, Mr. Caine,” he said. “And thanks for the cat.”