Chapter 12
Catfish and Brazos each whistled for their horses, then Catfish left Brazos with Skinny Thorson and moved slowly into the cabin, his guts tied in knots. There wasn’t much furniture in the place—just a long table, some chairs, a potbelly stove, and an old tarnished-brass bed in one corner.
There were three dead men in the place, lying in pools of their own blood. Brazos could still clean up with the Henry. Catfish would give him that.
Beth lay on the bed, wrapped in what appeared to be a single sheet.
She lay on her side, curled in a tight ball, shivering. Her hair was a tangled mess. A nightgown, robe, and slippers lay on the floor by the bed. The room stank with what these animals had done to the poor girl.
“Beth . . .”
She turned to him. She had a nasty cut on her lower lip, and her right eye was puffing up. There were welts on her cheeks and on her forehead.
“Don’t look at me, Catfish,” she said in a thin little voice, and lay her head back down on the stained mattress. The only bedding was the one thin sheet. One small pink foot stuck out from beneath it. It appeared heartbreakingly fragile here in this fetid hell of a cabin.
Catfish sat down on the bed. It sagged deeply with his weight. “They’re all dead, darlin’. Except Skinny. He’ll hang. There’s nothin’ more they can do to you.”
“Please, Catfish,” Beth said, voice quavering with emotion. “Just go. You an’ Brazos, go. I just want to be alone. I want to die here . . . alone!”
She sniffed and sobbed. The bed shook with her sorrow.
Catfish chewed off his right-hand glove and slid wet curls of her brown hair back from her cheek—a gentle caress. Still, she gave a start at his touch. At his man’s touch, after she’d been treated so terribly by men. If you could call what lay outside men.
They were lower than the lowest vermin.
“We can’t let you do that, Beth—Brazos an’ me. We’re gonna get you back to town, get you to Doc Overholser. He’ll take good care of you.”
Catfish paused. She just stared down at the bed—her big, jovial, intelligent spirit drained out of her.
“Think you can ride?” Catfish asked her.
She shook her head.
“We’ll rig a travois for you, then. We’ll stay here tonight, ride out tomorrow. We’ll keep Skinny outside. You won’t even have to look at him. We’ll get these dead men out of here.”
Tears welled in her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks to the blue mattress ticking.
“You rest easy, darlin’,” Catfish said. “We’ll be right outside.” He wanted to give her shoulder an affectionate squeeze, but decided not to touch her again. She’d been touched enough.
Outside, the thud of oncoming horses sounded.
Catfish walked back out through the rear door. His horse and Brazos’s chestnut each stood with their reins dangling, sniffing and disapproving of the smell of fresh blood. Brazos’s chestnut, Abe, whickered deep in his chest and stomped a rear hoof. Jasper shook his head.
Skinny knelt where he’d been kneeling before, near his dead brother. His arms hung straight down at his sides. Brazos was pulling a rope out of his saddlebags. Skinny glared up at Catfish and said, “I thought you two old devils was retired!”
Brazos turned to him, holding the rope.
Catfish raised a hand to his partner. “Don’t tie him yet.”
Brazos lowered the rope to his side.
Catfish prodded the kid with his boot toe. “Get up, Skinny.”
“What? No!”
“I said get up!” Catfish reached down and jerked the kid to his feet. Then he rammed his fist into the kid’s belly.
Skinny yelped as Catfish’s fist jerked him up off the ground. The scoundrel jackknifed forward, dropping to his knees. Catfish jerked him to his feet once more, then punched him once with his right fist and once with his left fist. Skinny moaned and went flying. He lay in the dirt on his side, glaring up at Catfish, brushing blood from his lips with his shirtsleeve.
“That’s against the rules,” Skinny said. “I know it’s against the rules!”
“No rules out here, kid,” Brazos told him. He looked at Catfish. “How’s Beth doing now?”
“In no condition to ride,” Catfish said. “We’ll stay here overnight, build her a travois in the morning.”
Brazos looked at Skinny. “How’re we gonna get him to town?” He glowered at Catfish. “You ran off all their hosses, Cha’les!”
Catfish winced. “I reckon I didn’t think it all the way through.”
* * *
Catfish had just checked on Beth once more, and now he stepped out the cabin’s back door. It was good dark now. He and Brazos had a small fire going, just off the cabin’s back stoop. They’d dragged two chairs out there, and Brazos sat in one now, slowly sipping the coffee they’d brewed on an iron spider.
Skinny Thorson sat to the left of the stoop.
Catfish and Brazos had dragged his dead brother and the rest of Thorson’s gang off into the brush.
Brazos had tied Skinny to a roof support post, hands behind his back, ankles tied straight out in front of him. The kid hadn’t said two words since Catfish had taken him to the woodshed, so to speak.
He and Catfish and Brazos would sleep out here tonight, leaving the cabin to Beth.
“How is she feeling?” Brazos asked.
“Same. Hasn’t moved. Refuses food, even coffee.”
Brazos sighed and sipped his java. “I sure hate what those animals did to that poor girl, Cha’les.”
Catfish used a leather swatch to remove the coffeepot from the iron spider and refilled his cup with the steaming brew. “Yep, to her and her father, Abel didn’t deserve to be gunned down like that, neither. He was just tryin’ to keep the lid on the town.”
“I hope they can find another pair of lawmen.”
“Me too.” Catfish eased his weight into the chair to Brazos’s left. “I hear it’s gone to hell in a handbasket all over again . . . since Abel’s been gone. What, with the railroad an’ all.”
Brazos was leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, running his thumbs along the rim of his cup. “Maybe we oughta pin the badges back on again, Cha’les.”
He glanced at his old partner.
Catfish frowned skeptically. “You serious?”
Brazos smiled and wagged his head. “Nah. Them days are long over for me.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Catfish sipped his coffee. “I’ll hang around the office long enough for the judge to come and play cat’s cradle with Skinny’s head, though.”
Skinny glared up at him, curling one half of his torn, bloody upper lip.
“Then I’ll head back to my shack. I got me a catfish been makin’ a bloody fool out’n me.”
Brazos chuckled. “You always did like a platter of greasy catfish, Cha’les.”
“Always have, always will.”
Brazos looked at him sidelong. “Dick Gleeson, eh?”
Catfish looked at his old partner.
“Vonetta,” Brazos said. “She was really steppin’ out with that fancy gambler?”
“Sure enough.” Again, Catfish sipped his mud. “Sorry, Brazos. I didn’t want you to know . . . about whose the baby really was. I just wanted to get her out of town. She agreed, took the ticket I bought for her, and then she was gone.”
“Hmm.” Brazos tapped his thumbs on the rim of his cup. “I reckon I fell flat on that one.” He glanced at Catfish again.
“Forget about it.” Catfish stared at his coffee, then said, “You got a woman now?”
“Nah.” Brazos sipped his coffee. “Figure I’m done.”
“Where you been, partner?”
“Here an’ there. Driftin’. Rode shotgun on a stagecoach up in Colorado. Did some mule-skinnin’ in the Rockies. Worked as a gold guard on a train up in Dakota country. Just driftin’.”
“Yeah. Well, you look good.”
“Thanks. You don’t.”
Catfish snorted.
“The years,” Brazos said. “They pile up on a fellow.”
“Sure ’nough,” Catfish said with a sigh. He was about to add something more, but Brazos raised his left hand abruptly, leaning his head to one side, listening, frowning.
In the corral, the horses whickered uneasily and turned their heads to peer eastward. They lifted their heads and worked their noses. Jasper gave his tail an owly switch.
“Company, sounds like,” Catfish said as the clomping of hooves rose in the distance beyond the corral. He reached back for the Yellowboy leaning up against the cabin and set it across his knees.
Brazos grabbed his own repeater. “Sounds like.”
“Popular place.”
“Yep.”
At the same time, both men jacked live rounds into their rifles’ actions and lowered the hammers to half cock. They waited as the hooves grew louder. Shadows moved in the brush beyond the corral. Jasper whinnied, pranced. His greeting . . . or warning. . . was answered in kind by one of the newcomers’ horses.
The hoof thuds stopped.
A man called, “Halloo the cabin!”
“Ride in slow,” Catfish returned.
A man clucked; the thudding resumed. Catfish watched three riders silhouetted against the starlight ride up to within forty yards of the cabin and stop. They were just at the edge of the firelight, so Catfish couldn’t see much about them, except that one was larger, bulkier than the other two. He sat to the right end of the group. All three looked around, the orange light of the fire reflected in their eyes beneath their hat brims and in their horses’ eyes as well.
Their gazes seemed to catch on the bodies humped in the brush to the right of the fire. Earlier, Catfish had heard sniffing and snorting over there. Wolves, coyotes, or wildcats.
“Trouble here, maybe, eh?” called the big man, sitting up straight, one fist on his hip.
Catfish and Brazos sat in silence, tapping their thumbs on their rifles.
The three men looked at each other, and then the big one turned to Catfish and Brazos once more. “We’ll ride on.”
“Do that,” Brazos said.
The three men sat staring toward the two men on the porch, and Skinny sitting on the ground to Catfish’s left, hang-headed, none too pleased with his sorry lot.
“Say,” said the big man, canting his head to one side and riding up closer to the fire. He stopped just on the other side of the flames and, sliding his gaze from Catfish to Brazos and back again, said, “Ain’t you Catfish Charlie Tuttle an’ Brazos McQueen?”
Catfish and Brazos stared at him.
The big man gave a dry chuckle and glanced over his shoulder at the other two, who remained at the edge of the firelight. Turning back to Catfish and Brazos, he said, “I thought you two was finished. Years ago, now . . .”
“We got a little left in us,” Catfish said.
The big man glanced into the brush. “I see that.”
Brazos scowled beneath the brim of his black Stetson. “Ain’t you Merwin Carlisle?”
“What if I was?”
Catfish and Brazos looked at each other and chuckled.
Then Catfish turned to the big man and said, “Why don’t you haul your fat behind out of here, Merwin? You done already worn out your welcome.”
Carlisle blinked. He had a big, round, bearded face with deep-set eyes. In the firelight, Catfish saw a long, sickle-shaped scar running through his beard, down his left cheek. Compliments of a fellow boarder in the Texas State Pen, most likely.
“Still impolite as ever—eh, Catfish?” Carlisle said.
“You heard me,” Catfish said.
He could see anger building in the old outlaw’s eyes. Carlisle reined his beefy dun around and rode back the way he’d come. “We may meet again one day, Catfish . . . Brazos.”
The other two sat staring at Catfish and Brazos and then reined their mounts around and followed Carlisle into the night’s deep shadows beyond the corral. Their hoof thuds dwindled to silence.
Brazos said, “Did you notice the saddlebags on Merwin’s hoss?”
“They looked a mite swollen.”
Catfish stared into the darkness beyond the fire, listening, tapping his gloved right thumb against the off-cocked hammer of his Winchester.
The fire burned low.
The two horses in the corral stared off into the darkness. Jasper had his tail arched.
Finally there was a sudden fast clomping of hooves and three shadows moved, the three horseback riders coming fast—one from Catfish’s left, one from straight out in the trees, the other to the right of the fire.
Guns flashed in the darkness and Merwin Carlisle shouted, “Get them old dogs, boys!”
Moving faster than he’d thought himself able, Catfish slid down off his chair, drew the Yellowboy’s hammer back to full cock, pressed the butt plate to his shoulder, and returned fire at the man on his left, who, judging by his size growing in the darkness beyond the cabin, was Carlisle himself. Catfish fired three times, jacking and firing.
Merwin screamed, threw his arms straight out from his shoulders, and flew backward off his galloping mount.
Brazos had been blasting away to Catfish’s right, evoking a scream from over there as well. He and Catfish each fired two rounds at the rider approaching quickly from the fire’s far side. That man threw his rifle up high above his head and rolled straight back over his horse’s arched tail. He turned a single somersault, then lay flat on his face and belly, unmoving.
Catfish pushed off his knees, standing.
Brazos did the same.
“Well,” Catfish said, drawing a deep breath, the smell of powder smoke strong in his nose, “I reckon we have a hoss for Skinny.”
Skinny cursed.
Brazos chuckled.