Old Billy Murphy poked left and right with his crutch to clear a path for himself through the funeral parlor doorway.
“Out of me way, damn and bedevil you! Is it true what I’m hearin’?”
The miners cleared a path for him. Like Murphy, most of them were Irish. Their grim looks answered his questions more eloquently than words and for a moment the fierce-faced old man seemed drained of the power to move or speak as he stood leaning on his crutch staring from face to face.
Then undertaker Bert Egstrom, long, gaunt and solemn, appeared in the doorway leading to the bigger room where he kept the coffins. Egstrom rubbed his dry hands together and said, “He’s in here, Mr. Murphy.”
Murphy swung around. There were a dozen or so men in the second room where three pinewood coffins stood on carpenter’s horses. The shades were drawn against the glare of the sun, but the room was gloomy rather than cool. Two strangers stood leaning against the bench along the far wall. On the bench behind them with a pair of boots sticking out was a canvas-covered shape. In the center of the room an uncovered body lay on another heavy bench. The body had red hair, the color Old Billy Murphy’s had been before it turned pure white.
Murphy’s lips twitched as he moved to the bench to stare down at his son. His sick drinker’s face paled, making the network of red veins stand out. On one cheek was a big mole like a peg driven into the skin.
“Murdered!” he whispered in the thick quiet, his eyes taking in the ugly holes studding the corpse. “Look how they murdered me son!”
“You have my deepest sympathy, Mr. Murphy,” Egstrom murmured with professional gloom. “We all understand how you must feel.”
“The devil you do!” blazed the old man whose temper could be impressive even if he was as skinny as a snake and half crazy. His red-rimmed eyes bulged as he jabbed a shaking finger at the corpse. “Look at him in the name of St. Patrick—massacred he is! What did they slaughter me darlin’ boy with, a Gatlin’ gun? Who did it? What blackguard committed the foul deed? Tell me, God rot your souls!”
The miners looked silently at the two strangers. Old Billy Murphy straightened slowly as he stared at them, a giant in a faded purple shirt and a tall man dressed like a gambler. His eyes flicked down to the low-hung guns they wore, then lifted again to their faces. Their expressions were devoid of either sympathy or guilt as they met the terrible accusation of his glare.
“They are the murderers?” His voice was a hoarse whisper.
Bert Egstrom made to explain, but Duke Benedict cut him off. “We shot your son, Murphy. He ambushed us yesterday afternoon along the Hondo Trail.”
“Liar!” the old man screamed. “Tommy was a good boy, a gentle, clean-livin’—”
“Save it, joker,” Brazos said. “We’ve been talkin’ to folks about your son. Seems he was a rotten-tempered little polecat that’s been in trouble all his life.”
Murphy tried to speak but rage choked him off.
“We also have a fair idea what he was up to,” put in Benedict, who had coaxed considerable information about Tommy Murphy from the gabby Egstrom before the old man arrived. “As you might have guessed by now, my name is Benedict. I’m a friend of—”
“Benedict!” Murphy gasped. “Kingston’s hired gun!”
“Kingston’s friend,” corrected Benedict who’d been puzzled to learn earlier that not only was his arrival anticipated in the mining town, but he was reputed to be a gun-for-hire whom Foley Kingston had imported. “I’m not a hired gun, even though it seems many of you believe so.” He pointed to the corpse of Tommy Murphy. “He believed it, old man, and it is my educated guess that he rode out yesterday to try and account for me before I could get to Spargo. Would that be right, old man?”
“Lies!” Murphy gasped. He stared in mute appeal at the men about him, but their eyes fell away from his glance. They were big, rough, muscular men, mostly illiterate and violent and suspicious by nature, but they shared a respect bordering on dread of men of the fast gun breed. Well before Benedict’s arrival in Spargo, his name had been bruited about as a wonder gunman and bloody-handed killer. His arrival with big Brazos and two dead men across their saddles, backed by his air of authority and the double guns he wore, seemed to support all they’d heard about him.
Old Billy Murphy sensed their reluctance to support him and it enraged him even more. Swinging away from his son’s body, he advanced towards Benedict and Brazos with words spilling out of him as if they scalded his mouth.
“Hired killers! The lowest breed there is! You don’t have loyalty to any man—just to the dirty dollar.” He halted before them, gesticulating. “You come to a town where honest, God-fearin’ and hard-workin’ men are locked in an honest fight for better conditions with a money-grubbin’ rich man—and you kill a man’s son and then flaunt his death as if it was somethin’ noble you’d done.” The old man’s body shook with the force of his emotion, and he lifted his crutch as if to lash out with it. “Killers! Well, I’m not afeared of you even if everybody else seems to be. I won’t be backin’ and crawlin’ and—”
His tirade was interrupted by a menacing growl. The old man jumped back, nearly falling as Bullpup scurried from behind the two men and bared his teeth at the threatening crutch.
“Mother of God!” the old man yelped. “What in the name of Lucifer is it?”
Pleased by the effect his appearance created, the massive, bull-headed hound barked to identify himself as a dog, then squatted when Brazos snapped his fingers at him.
“Like me, he don’t take kindly to pilgrims bellerin’ and shoutin’,” Brazos said. Murphy, recovering from his shock, started to talk again, but Brazos over-rode him. “Look, old feller, you don’t seem to get the straight of this. Instead of you roarin’ and dirty-namin’ us, you ought to be grateful we brought your dry-gulchin’ son in with us instead of leavin’ him—”
“Dry-gulchin’?” Murphy cried. “What foulness is this? Who are ye sayin’ me boy killed?”
“Him.” Benedict flicked the canvas cover from the second corpse. “Chad Bowers, old man, an out-of-work cowboy who joined us to ride up here looking for honest work—shot down like a dog by your fine son. Now what do you have to say?”
Murphy swallowed convulsively as he stared down at Bowers’ waxen face, then he turned away. “I’m not believin’ it,” he panted, but he didn’t sound convincing. “Me boy wouldn’t do a man in that way.”
“You reckon not?” Brazos said. “Well, tell us this, mister. If your boy wasn’t out huntin’ trouble, what was he doin’ twenty miles along the Hondo Trail? Mebbe you can explain that on account nobody else seems to have much idea.”
For a moment a trapped, furtive look crossed Murphy’s face. Then he grew defiant. “All right, all right, spout your filthy lies in a bereaved old man’s face—spit on a father’s grief if you will ... but there’ll be a reckonin’ for ye, by all the saints there will be!”
He gestured contemptuously at the men who’d been watching the clash in tense silence.
“Everybody on our side of the fence in this unlucky town isn’t old like me or yellow-gutted like them here that calls themselves men. Just wait until Clancy hears about this, you butchers, then you’ll be smirkin’ on the other side of your faces. Clancy’ll be knowin’ how to deal with your dirty breed—and don’t you be makin’ no mistake about that.”
Benedict and Brazos exchanged exasperated glances, nodded, and without a word headed for the door together. Suddenly they’d had enough of the smell of death and Old Billy Murphy’s mouth. Suddenly they needed air.
“Clancy!” the old man’s shout followed them out. “He’ll see you rue the day you come to do Kingston’s bloody work for him.”
Benedict halted when they hit the street, tugging out a cigar and frowning back at the funeral parlor. “Just as well we left when we did,” he said tightly. “I was about up to here with that old fool calling me a paid killer.”
Brazos’ gaze played over the dusty street as he stood with his weight on one leg, hip thrust out, and twisting a smoke. “Seems he ain’t the only one hereabout with that idea, Yank. Seems the whole damned town figures it the same way.” He licked his cigarette into shape, set it between his teeth. “How come, you reckon?”
Exhaling a cloud of blue cigar smoke, Benedict shook his head as they moved slowly off along the shady side of the street. “I don’t rightly know, Reb,” he said thoughtfully. “For one, I’m not a gunfighter, and even if I were, I can’t understand why Foley Kingston should put out a story like that.”
Brazos lifted his gaze to the mansion that stood atop the steep, round-crowned hill at the far end of Spargo’s main stem, Johnny Street. Spargo, a poor-man town of frame, adobe and tarpaper, was set on white alkali flats, half encircled on the eastern side by the Bucksaw Mountains. Spargo’s dust, heat and almost palpable stink of poverty made Foley Kingston’s mansion that much more impressive by comparison.
It was a big, white two-storied house with lofty marble colonnades and rows of glittering colonial windows now reflecting the yellow sun. Surrounded by heavy shade trees and high iron fences, the building reminded Brazos powerfully of the great serene plantation mansions of the South that he’d fought to defend during the war—before Benedict’s bunch got busy burning them to the ground. The similarity seemed all the stronger because of the contrast between the opulence and the poverty, just as it had been in Georgia and Tennessee.
Brazos said, “Just what sort of a feller is this Kingston, Benedict?”
“What sort? Well, he’s an officer and a gentleman for starters.”
Brazos was unimpressed. “If all the sons-of-bitches I’ve ever struck that called theirselves officers and gentlemen was laid out end-to-end, it’d likely be a good thing. I mean what’s he really like?”
“You’ll soon find out for yourself. We’re going up to see him as soon as we’ve checked into the hotel and spruced up.”
“Mebbe we should’ve gone to see him afore we took them bodies to the undertaker’s.”
“No ... no, I wanted to get the feel of this place before I saw Foley.”
“Do you reckon you got the feel of it yet?”
Benedict wasn’t sure. Certainly they’d already learned a great deal about Spargo. The town was locked in a strike between the miners and Foley Kingston. The miners, claiming that the Motherlode Mine was unsafe following a series of fatal accidents, were refusing to work until conditions were improved. According to Egstrom, the undertaker, the trouble, six weeks old now with no sign of capitulation on either side, had been marked by frequent violent clashes between the strikers and Kingston’s men.
Obviously a desperate situation, Benedict thought. As for getting the feel of the place, he didn’t know about that. There was something about Spargo that couldn’t be absorbed in a hurry, he reflected as he met the scowling stares of a group of denim-jacketed men loafing in the arcade on the central block. The taste and smell of Spargo was not merely of its dust, which seemed to hang above it in an eternal pall, but it was the taste of suspicion and the smell of fear and anger.
“Perhaps the funeral parlor is not the ideal place to get the feel of a town,” Benedict suggested, halting opposite a lofty building where the batwings stood propped open to catch any whiff of breeze. He smiled for the first time since they rode over the bridge across Cherry Creek with the dead men. “If you get my meaning?”
Brazos peered across at the sign that read:
SILVER KING SALOON
ACE BEAUFORD PROP.
BEER! WHISKY! GIRLS!
Not being able to read or write, the sign could have been written in Arabic for all Brazos knew, but he’d never needed book-learning to be able to recognize a saloon. His grin answering Benedict’s, he pushed his battered disaster of a hat to the back of his big head, spat on his hands with the air of a man about to undertake a pleasurable job of work and led the way across the street ... totally unaware of the eyes of the most dangerous man in Spargo drilling at them from the Chisum Street corner.
Clancy was his name and ruling the Spargo roost was his game. As wild a son as Mother Ireland had produced in many a long and hungry generation, he stood six feet four from his brass-heeled boots to the top of his great curly head. He dressed out at two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle and fiery temperament and was the swaggering, bullying, blarneying boss of Spargo’s army of Irish miners. Sly and violent, crafty and hot-headed, he was the leader not because he was most gifted to lead, but because his iron fists had long since hammered down the last man who’d sought to contest his place at the top of the heap. Afraid of only one living person, a skinny little old woman he called mother, it was Clancy who’d brought the Spargo miners out on strike, and now he was committed to keeping them out, every ugly one of them, until Foley Kingston had given in to their demands. This was Patrick Michael Clancy. Himself.
“Which one is Benedict?” he asked in a peat-bog brogue to runty little Larry O’Rourke who stood with him on the corner watching the two tall men crossing Johnny Street for the Silver King. “The gombeen in the tinhorn suit or the great lump with the hound?”
“The one in the suit, Paddy,” supplied O’Rourke, who had gone to fetch Clancy when the two strangers had arrived at Egstrom’s with the dead men. “Didn’t I tell you he looked a bad one and all? You see the two guns he’s got hangin’ off his belt?”
“I see ’em, right enough.” Clancy smacked his palm with a giant fist. “I see ’em ...”
O’Rourke waited patiently for some ten seconds, then looked up expectantly. “Well, what are you waitin’ for, Clancy? Are you goin’ to be bustin’ his head in for him before he can slaughter any more brave boys?”
To O’Rourke’s surprise, Paddy Clancy shook his curly head slowly and deliberately as he stared at the doors the two men had vanished through. O’Rourke, a weasel-faced little man who played parasite pilot fish to Clancy’s shark, said innocently:
“Surely you’re not for lettin’ the man get away with the foul murder of poor Murphy now, Clancy?”
“‘Tweren’t murder.”
O’Rourke’s jaw fell open. “It weren’t?”
“The young idjut was for listenin’ too much to his old man,” Clancy explained. “Old Billy reckoned we oughta try and stop this Benedict before he got here, and Tommy, wantin’ to make a big man of himself, begged me to let him try.”
“And so you did, eh?”
“To be sure ... but I should have known better. Young Murphy was nivver much smarter than Old Billy ... and his brain is addled by hate and whisky. He wanted to be a hero and all he done was kill a cowboy and make an ugly corpse of himself.”
O’Rourke’s skinny shoulders slumped and he pulled out a kerchief and coughed into it. He wasn’t much surprised to hear the truth about Murphy; he’d always found him a poisonous little echo of his mad old man at best. But he was disappointed that Clancy wasn’t about to avenge Murphy’s death. Sickly, plagued by a hacking cough, unemployable, and not too long for this world, one of the few pleasures O’Rourke had left was tagging after Clancy and enjoying the violence that followed the giant like a shadow.
“So ... so you’re just goin’ to forget the whole terrible business, are ye, Clancy?” he said, making one last try.
“I’m not goin’ to go jumpin’ a man they’re sayin’ handles guns like me mother handles a set of rosary beads,” Clancy growled. “But I’m not goin’ to forget it neither.”
He hitched at his broad leather belt. “The high-steppin’ tenderfoot’ll bleed for what he’s done, make no mistake,” he concluded, and then he swaggered down the street to pay his last respects to Tommy Murphy. After that he’d confer long and earnestly with his secret partner, a man of money and power and sinister ambition who saw in Benedict’s arrival a threatening new element introduced into the life-or-death game they were playing with Foley Kingston.