CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The coming dark had thinned the daylight to the color of tin, and Cooley lit the oil lamp in Dan Caine’s room. He smiled. “Eighteen games of five card stud and you only won two. You’re surely a disgrace to the gambling profession, Deputy Caine.”
“I think you cheated,” Dan said.
“And you’re a sore loser,” Cooley said. “You know I always play fair when I’ve got a winning hand.”
Dan tossed his cards onto the bed. “I don’t want to play anymore. Looking at all those damned kings and queens and knaves gave me a headache.”
“Next time I’ll deal you a sight fewer of those,” Cooley said. Then, after studying Dan’s ashen face, “Not feeling so good, are you?”
“The pain in my side gives me no rest, like a hungry gopher is gnawing at me,” Dan said. “Susan Stanton sure knew where to put a bullet.”
“You look tired,” Cooley said.
“Tired? I feel like I’ve been run down, run over, and wrung out,” Dan said.
“And here I am beating you like a drum at poker when you should be in bed.”
“I’m staying awake, Clint,” Dan said. “I still feel something mighty bad is coming down . . . soon . . . like it’s just over the horizon and headed my way.”
“Well, whatever it is, I’ll side you, just like I did in the mountains,” Cooley said.
Dan shook his head. “Not this time, Clint. Hurd is in jail, and now I’m the only law in Thunder Creek. I’ll handle it.”
“Not when your misery has you feeling so poorly,” Cooley said.
“Let me rest this damned aching head for a spell and I’ll be fine,” Dan said. “Whatever it is coming at me, I got it to do. And I mean alone.”
“As you say, Deputy Sheriff Caine,” Cooley said. “But if you need me . . .”
“Don’t worry, I’ll squeal like a piglet caught under a gate,” Dan said.
After Clint Cooley left, Dan lay back on his pillows, closed his eyes, and dozed.
He’d been asleep for two hours when the cowboys came to town.
* * *
Doan tried to calm things down, even giving the twenty punchers a round on the house, something he did only once a year on Independence Day.
But he bucked a stacked deck.
Idaho Barnes and Shorty Key worked the crowd, whipping them into a frenzy of loathing for Chance Hurd and all he stood for. Barnes played up the murders of the Calthrop family and the sheriff’s hand in it.
“Hurd and Clay Kyle planned the whole thing,” Barnes said. “Hurd was convinced Tom Calthrop had a large sum of money in the house, and Kyle damn near burned his toes off trying to get Tom to tell where it was. But the Calthrops was broke, there was no money, and Tom died for it.”
“Deputy Caine made Kyle pay for his crime when he killed him in the Sierra del Carmen Mountains,” Shorty Key said. “But now Hurd thinks he’ll walk free once the circuit judge gets here.”
“I’m damned if he will,” a cowboy said, a statement that was met with growls of approval.
“Shorty, where is the drummer?” Barnes said.
The little puncher smiled. “He’s waiting outside under guard. He’s afraid to come inside.”
“No harm will come to him in Doan’s,” Barnes said. “Bring him in.”
“He’ll piss his pants for sure,” Shorty said. “But I’ll go get him.”
A cowboy pushed a frightened little man into the store who was uneasily aware that he stood among mighty salty men with huge mustaches and angry faces.
“State your name and occupation,” Barnes said.
“Timothy Bean. I’m a . . .”
“LOUDER!” Barnes roared.
“Tim . . . Tim . . . Timothy Bean. I’m . . . I’m . . . a traveling salesman,” the little man said, no louder than before, but even more scared.
“And you were in Ma Lester’s boardinghouse the day she was murdered,” Barnes said, now that he’d well and truly intimidated his witness.
“Yes . . . yes, I was,” Bean said, his face a picture of misery. “Oh, I do wish my lady wife was here.”
“Pete, give Timothy a drink,” a grinning puncher said.
“I don’t drink,” Bean said. “My lady wife always says, ‘There’s a serpent in every bottle and he biteth like the viper.’”
“She sounds like a woman with horse sense,” Barnes said.
“Oh, she has,” Bean said. “But she says I have none. Horse sense, I mean.”
“A fine lady, no doubt,” Barnes said. “Now tell these gentlemen what you saw and heard in the hallway when Ma Lester was murdered. Spread the gospel, Mr. Bean.”
What Timothy Bean had to say came out in a rush, as though he wanted to get this ordeal over. “I saw Sheriff Hurd with his . . .”
“Slow down, Mr. Bean,” Barnes said. “Damn it, man, take a deep breath and try again.”
“Sorry, I’m of a most nervous disposition,” Bean said.
Pete Doan, standing behind his counter that also served as a bar, intervened. “Just tell what you saw, Timothy. And take a chair.”
Bean nodded and sat. “Well, I opened my hotel door a crack and saw Sheriff Hurd with his hands around Ma Lester’s throat. I closed my door, and then I heard a shot.”
“And that shot came after Deputy Caine tried to intervene but collapsed unconscious in the hallway from an earlier wound,” Barnes said. “Hurd fired into Ma Lester, pressed Dan Caine’s own revolver into his hand and then ran into the street to spread the word that the deputy had tried to rape the woman and had then shot her.”
That last was greeted with a profound, stunned silence that slowly grew into savage growls of anger . . . the roar of the mob.
“Wait, just wait!” Doan yelled with great urgency. He froze, a bottle of whiskey in his hand and a bar towel draped over his left shoulder. “Mr. Bean, are you willing to testify at Hurd’s trial? Will you tell the court what you saw?”
Bean swallowed hard several times and his fingers tied themselves in knots in his lap. He tried to talk, but all that came out was a squeak, a fearful rodent noise from a mousy little man.
Idaho Barnes said nothing, but his actions attracted the attention of every man present. Shorty Key would say later that it was a moment of truth that tested the resolve of the cowboys and dictated their future deeds. The cook stepped to the back of the store where ranch and farm supplies were displayed and took a coil of hemp rope from a hook on the wall. He ran about fifty feet of rope through his hands and then skillfully made a hangman’s noose at one end. As a man who’d ridden with Captain William Clarke Quantrill during the late war, it was a thing he’d done before.
Barnes dangled the noose for all to see. “I say Chance Hurd has had his trial, right here in this room,” he said. “Now let me hear the verdict.”
To a man, the cowboys yelled, “Guilty!”
“Then let’s hang the murderer,” Burt Wells said, a man with darkness in him.
“No!” Doan said. “We must do this legally.”
A cowboy said, “It is legal, Pete.” He pushed the storekeeper aside. “Now get out of the way.”
The cowboys spilled from the store and noisily headed for the sheriff’s office. Barnes carried the noose as the moon cast a fragile, beautiful opalescent light on the scene . . . uncaring of the dark, violent doings of men.