Rogue Law

  Rogue Law

  Paul Lederer writing as Logan Winters

  ONE

  Three .44 rounds were popped off nearby and Les Holloway untangled his legs and rose to his feet, reaching for his shotgun.

  ‘Probably at the New Amsterdam.’

  ‘Probably,’ I agreed. ‘I saw Cheyenne Baker and his crew riding in a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘They’ve had plenty of time to get tanked up, then. Probably is them.’

  We had been sitting in the town marshal’s office, sipping bad black coffee and exchanging improbable stories. The shooting had interrupted that.

  ‘Want to go along?’ Les asked me, and I shook my head.

  ‘I’m not the one the town is paying for that. Besides, Cheyenne doesn’t like me and he might take the notion to extend his list of customers.’

  ‘Nice sense of civic duty you have,’ Les said sourly. He wasn’t so much mad at me as at Cheyenne Baker and his gang for interrupting what had been up till then a peaceful Saturday morning. Les wore his badge uncertainly and didn’t like having to stand for it unless it was absolutely necessary. He had a wife who was hoping that the job of town marshal would bring a tidy, steady income and give her the chance for a settled town life after grueling years of trying to scratch a living from a dry earth farm.

  Les tucked his shotgun under his arm, touched his wildly bristling mustache and settled a glowering look on me as he walked to the door. I smiled in return, toasting him with my coffee mug.

  I was still smiling when Les flung open the office door and stepped outside to be cut down by a swarm of bullets fired from across the street.

  I dove for the floor with the .44s whining around the room, ricocheting off the brick walls, breaking the glass over the picture of President Grant hanging above the gunrack and nearly truncating my young and useless life. I found that a fragment of lead had nicked my elbow and, cursing the loss of my new yellow silk shirt, I crawled across the plank floor of the jailhouse as the bullets continued to fly. I saw two of them hit Les’s prostrate body hard enough to cause him to lift slightly from the planks. I rolled to the side, away from the doorway and waited for the shooting to die down.

  When the gunplay had ended I reached out, grabbed Les by his boots and tugged him into the office, closing the heavy oak door behind him. I dropped the bar across the door and crouched over Les. I hadn’t expected to find any life lingering in him, and I did not. I crouched on my heels, silently, diligently cursing.

  By the time I had Les placed on his jailhouse bunk, arms neatly folded, his face covered with a blanket, the local citizens had started to arrive. Shaking their heads, murmuring platitudes, whispering regrets, they gathered in a tight bunch as if for protection. I sat with a fresh cup of coffee, my boots crossed on Les’s desk and waited for the righteous anger to arise. That would be next after a few solemn moments, followed by the determination to rid the town of its bad element once and for all.

  I said nothing to the solid citizens, saving my voice to instruct the mortician on what was to be done with Les. It was the same thing the town had done with its last three law officers – take him out to boot hill and plant him.

  Righteous anger had faded and the mourning group of citizens reformed itself into a committee for action before anyone spoke directly to me.

  ‘Lang,’ the mayor, Calvin Jefferson, said after clearing his throat and hooking his thumbs into his vest pockets, ‘we want you for town marshal. You’re a man who can—’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed, causing a few eyebrows to arch. One of the women in the back tittered hysterically, but maybe she had thought of a good Irish joke.

  ‘You’ll do it?’ the mayor asked, with a frown of astonishment, if such a thing can be formed on the human face.

  ‘Yes. All I will require is a force of twenty deputies. These men will be available to work day and night, supervising all the gaming and drinking establishments in town. They will also be required to relieve all visitors of their firearms immediately they cross the city limits. Then—’

  I made the mistake of taking a breath and the mayor jumped in. ‘Impossible.’ His hands flew wildly into the air.

  ‘No more impossible than expecting one man to police these streets and alleys where dozens of armed drunks with imagined grudges and real disagreements are wandering.’

  ‘What you are asking is absurd,’ our town banker, a man named Rufus Potter said, with a deep laugh. At least he found me amusing. The others, judging by their expressions, did not.

  ‘No, sir,’ I replied, ‘what you are asking is absurd. As the ghosts of your last three town marshals would attest to.’ I perched on the corner of the desk, my arms crossed. ‘There is another way to convince me,’ I told the gathered few. Their expressions brightened.

  ‘Go on,’ Rufus Potter encouraged.

  ‘Is Judge Plank here? Good. As an alternative, the judge or someone else shall draw up a will for me. Now, the money—’

  ‘What money?’ Mayor Jefferson demanded.

  ‘The five thousand dollars that you will insure my life for. This money can be paid to my mother upon my demise. She lives in St Joseph. I’ll have to look up the address for you later.’

  I had lost my audience. There was some angry muttering and a few loud disclaimers. I heard the woman titter again. That joke she remembered must have been a good one.

  ‘Five thousand!’ was all Banker Potter could force between his tightened lips.

  ‘My life must be worth something,’ I argued. ‘You can’t expect a man to accept a contract for suicide without having him think of those he must leave behind.’

  ‘You’re talking foolishness, Lang, and it’s not amusing. Not at a time like this.’

  ‘She thinks it is,’ I said, having finally discovered the lady in green who was twirling a parasol, smiling and having a merry time considering it was a wake she was attending.

  The mayor settled into a serious, man-to-man voice. ‘Lang, you see that we need a peace officer. What is the town to do without a marshal? Every citizen has, must feel an obligation to his community. If we have not, we have no community.’

  There was a group of kids in front of the jail, peering around the doorframe trying to get in on the excitement. I shooed them away with a sudden motion. I never have understood what fascination the dead have for people. Once a man is dead his entertainment value is pretty much nil. I was thinking that while the gathered committee thought I was considering obligations and such.

  I rose from the desk and went to the hat tree to recover my Stetson. ‘Gentlemen – and lady – I am not a citizen of Montero. I come in once a month or so to purchase coffee, sugar, salt, beans … tinned peaches or tomatoes, if McCormick has them at a good price, sometimes a few walnuts … which I recall now I forgot to ask for today.’

  ‘Get to it, Lang!’

  ‘And to see which of my former friends or acquaintances has been shot and killed because this town really doesn’t give a damn about cleaning itself up except for hiring the occasional sacrificial badge-toter. Why is that? Because the town couldn’t exist without its seamy establishments. What bunch of cowboys is going to ride in here on payday to watch the women knit socks or enjoy a checkers tournament? They want women, drink, card-playing and roughhouse.

  ‘So do you all, though you won’t admit it. The establishments you rail against are your tax base, your major bank depositors, your political backers. No – I’m sorry – I don’t feel like pinning a bull’s-eye over my heart and parading the streets of this hell town.’ Another excited murmur began, but I hadn’t come to argue with these people. I looked at the clock on the wall and announced that it was time for me to be riding. Stalking toward the door through a tunnel of angry gloom I heard a high-pitched, musical voice
call, ‘Don’t forget your walnuts!’

  The lady laughed again. I guess I was even funnier than the Irish joke she had remembered.

  The streets were dusty, white-hot and silent outside. I supposed that Cheyenne Baker and his crew had retired to the Golden Eagle to slug down a few drinks in fond remembrance of Les Holloway. I untied my little sorrel pony from the hitch rail and led it along with my pack horse back toward McCormick’s Emporium. It wasn’t only walnuts that I had forgotten. The morning’s events had reminded me that it was time to stock up on ammunition. There had been a few rustlers slipping around my unfenced dry earth ranch lately. I had seen their sign, though I had lost but one calf, and that one may have just starved to death, considering the poor graze the Rafter L had to offer.

  Yes, I had a registered brand though Les and others had thought it amusing that I would waste fifty dollars on the fees. Twenty-three (or two if that calf didn’t show up again) cattle seemed hardly worth it to their way of thinking. I supposed I was amusing to a lot of people in many ways. I even nurtured hopes of making that dusty little pocket of New Mexico Territory into a real ranch with house and well and everything. No matter that I had been at it three years now and accomplished nothing but thinning what grass there was growing on the parcel.

  ‘Your name is Julius Lang,’ I heard the woman say, as I finished collecting my purchases from the counter in McCormick’s store and turned to go.

  ‘Lang will do,’ I said to the woman in green.

  ‘Lang, then,’ she said, stepping nearer. I don’t know if she could be called beautiful, but her lightly freckled face, her broad amused lips and steady green eyes struck me as charming. The lilac scent she wore added to the charm and to my interest.

  ‘Walnuts?’ she asked, nodding at the small brown paper bag in my right hand.

  ‘Yes. Want some?’

  ‘They’re out of season. If they’re last year’s they may be all black inside,’ she said, ‘I don’t like them like that. Or full of dust the bugs left behind.’

  ‘You’re a connoisseur.’

  ‘No, but I like them. Let’s crack a few and see if they’re any good. If they’re all rotten, you can just toss them away here. Or maybe’ – she inclined her head toward McCormick – ‘he’ll give you your money back.’

  ‘Him! You haven’t been in town long, have you?’

  ‘No. Let’s have a look at those walnuts,’ she insisted, taking the bag from my hand.

  So we sat outside on the wooden bench McCormick provided for his customers. There was a narrow band of shade falling across the plankwalk in front of the store. We cracked walnuts and talked.

  Her name was Martha Ullman, but I was to call her Matti. She was from San Francisco and knew nothing of desert country although she had been born in Elko, Nevada. Uncle Webster Ullman was the one who knew this country – ‘Hangdog’ Ullman. Had I ever hear of him? No, I hadn’t.

  ‘I only arrived in town yesterday,’ Matti said. She was trying to crack a walnut with her teeth and I frowned and took it away from her, not wanting her to crack the porcelain. I managed the nut with thumb and forefinger and handed it back. She said, ‘I slept for fifteen hours, got up and started for the courthouse and that’s when the shooting began.’

  ‘So, like any smart woman you jumped back in the hotel.’

  ‘I went out to see what was going on,’ she contradicted. ‘That’s when I saw everybody emerging from cover and storming to the marshal’s office. I tagged along.’ The next walnut she cracked beneath the heel of her little boot, smashing it flat. I retrieved another from the paper bag and did the honors again.

  ‘There wasn’t much to see, was there?’ I commented.

  ‘Just all those stuffed shirts trying to railroad you into doing something you didn’t want to do and that they are afraid to do themselves. I laughed out loud. You heard me. I couldn’t help it despite the fact that a man was lying there dead.’

  ‘Les wouldn’t have minded,’ I told her. We had finished all the walnuts we wanted – only one of them had been black – and I rolled up the top of the bag and placed it aside.

  ‘So,’ she said, continuing her history, as we watched men and ladies, horses and buggies pass, the high-wheeled mine wagons stirring up clouds of yellow dust in their wakes. ‘Uncle Ullman—’

  ‘Hangdog.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she nodded. ‘Uncle Ullman passed away a year and a half ago. I didn’t hear about it until recently. Our family is kind of spread out. Nothing much was doing in San Francisco – I had been trying to teach piano to a bunch of tone-deaf matrons and their bratty children.’ She paused and corrected herself. ‘No, the children were tone-deaf and the matrons were bratty.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I encouraged.

  ‘Anyway,’ Matti said, flicking a fly away from her forehead, ‘it seems that Uncle Ullman left me a piece of property he had owned down here. A thousand acres less a county easement.’

  ‘That’s not a lot of land out here,’ I commented.

  ‘I know,’ Matti said. Quoting, apparently, she added, ‘Sere, inhospitable, sun-baked, waterless country where you can’t grow rattlesnakes fifty to an acre, and they’re considered to be prime stock down there.’

  ‘You talked to someone who knows,’ I had to agree. ‘Then why bother to look at the property?’

  ‘A person wants to see a piece of land if she owns it. It gives you a sense of belonging, if you know what I mean.’ I said I thought I did. ‘So here I am.’ She let both hands flutter away, indicating Montero.

  ‘Where is this property supposed to be?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. That’s why I was going to the courthouse – to the land office to look at their plats. I have a general idea, that’s all. Do you happen to know where Whipsaw Creek is?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said, lifting her eyes with the concentration of remembering, ‘my property lies along Whipsaw Creek which I imagine is dry?’ I nodded. ‘And runs along it from the thirty-mile post all the way to Arapaho Peak. Does that mean anything to you?’ Matti asked.

  ‘Yes, it does,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Not good, Matti. The land you’re describing is my land.’

  ‘No,’ she said quite calmly. ‘It isn’t. Hangdog willed it to me.’

  ‘Hangdog never owned it. That’s the Rafter L you are describing. I ought to know, I live there.’

  ‘You’ll have to move, then,’ Matti said. She was quite serious. The amusement had faded from her eyes.

  ‘I will like hell,’ I objected.

  ‘I’m sorry, Julius Lang. You have a nice enough face and your walnuts are just fine, but we cannot both be occupying the same parcel of land. I must ask you to leave. Of course,’ she said generously, ‘if you are running any stock, I’ll give you time to clear them off my land. What will you require? A week? Ten days?’

  ‘Come back in twenty years or so and ask me again,’ I said, not heatedly but with growing resentment. She was as cute as she could be, but cocksure of herself. Was this why she had been shining up to me, or the reason she had been laughing at me earlier?

  ‘I won’t ask again,’ Matti said, rising. She smoothed down her green skirt and picked up her parasol. ‘I’ll simply have the law – oh, that’s right there is no law here now, is there? I’ll simply have you displaced.’

  ‘I’d like to see that day,’ I said, rising to my feet as well. ‘I don’t know if you think this is an amusing game nor what institution you escaped from if you really believe what you’re saying. Or,’ I wondered suddenly, ‘did somebody put you up to this?’

  She unfurled her little green parasol, placed it over her shoulder and asked, without a hint of a smile, ‘Would you like to accompany me, then, to the courthouse? Since you choose not to believe me, perhaps you will accept the fact of a legally filed deed and an inspection of the county surveyor’s maps.’

  Soberly, I nodded. Unlooping the reins to th
e sorrel and the dun pack horse from the hitchrail, I tugged down my hat against the glare of the sun and followed along – Matti on the plankwalk, me in the street, leading my animals.

  ‘I miss the old times,’ Matti said, after we had walked a way, her twirling her green parasol on her shoulder.

  ‘The old times. San Francisco, you mean?’ I asked hopefully. Maybe Matti had already had enough of this country and was thinking about going home.

  She smiled and said, ‘I mean the old times when we were friends.’

  ‘You mean when we would sit in front of McCormick’s and eat walnuts without a care in the world.’

  She nodded. ‘Before you turned into a land-grabber.’

  ‘Lady, I’ve had just about—’

  She held up a dainty white hand, ‘Save it, buster. We’ll have this all resolved in a minute.’ She lifted her chin toward the adobe brick courthouse half a block away.

  ‘Buster,’ I muttered under my breath.

  She heard me and said, without turning her head, ‘I can’t call you “Lang” any longer, can I? When we were friends, that sort of intimacy was all right. But now.…’

  I muttered something again. This time, fortunately, Matti did not catch it.

  They stood square in the middle of the plankwalk and my jaw tightened with unhappy expectation. There were three of them: Cheyenne Baker, drunkenness marking his dark handsome features; the little man they called Indio; Frank Short. Cheyenne’s bravado was bolstered by whiskey, and possibly because he had shot down Les Halloway that morning. I had no proof of that, but here were the three of them and shots had been fired from three people when Les was gunned down stepping out of his office.

  For whatever reason, Cheyenne was feeling all puffed up with himself. His hat was tugged low, his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt, his thin smile dirtier than usual.

  ‘Well,’ he said in a drawling voice, ‘look at this little lady. Isn’t she a perfect picture?’

  I halted the sorrel, slipped my Winchester from its scabbard and stood behind my horse with the barrel of the rifle thrust across my saddle.

  ‘Get out of the way, Cheyenne,’ I told him, ‘or I’ll shoot you where you stand. All three of you.’