Free Last Lawman (9781101611456) by Peter Brandvold Page A

body of a horse pushed against her. She turned her head to look up and behind her. Clell Stanhope sat his tall grulla, reaching toward her with those cold, faintly leering eyes.
    “Leave me,” Erin said, her voice sounding like someone else’s.
    “Uh-uh,” the outlaw leader grunted as he wrapped his hand around her arm.
    Before she could stand and fight him, he’d jerked her away from the loading dock. She tried to hold on to Jim, but when Stanhope drew her closer to his horse, she dropped the child in the dirt.
    She became hysterical. She swung around and pounded her fists against the outlaw’s knees and thighs, though most of her punches landed on the stirrup fender or on the grulla’s whither or on the barrel of the shotgun that had killed Jim. Despite her screams and her fighting, she felt her right arm being pulled out of its socket until she found herself lying belly down across Stanhope’s saddle.
    Then the horse was galloping up the street. Each lunge was like a punch to her belly, the saddlebows digging into her middle while the horn raked her left hip raw.
    The ground pocked with hoofprints swept past her. She could see her hair hanging toward it, the ends barely brushing the finely churned dirt and bits of straw. She passed a body lying dead in the street. Idly, staring beyond the grulla’s lunging legs, she recognized the banker, Earl Thornberg, a hole in his forehead, his open eyes glassy.
    Then the town slid back behind her and she was carried off into the country to the west, screaming,
“Jimmy!”

EIGHT

    Feeling old and grumpy, Spurr walked out of the Laramie House Hotel, drawing the door closed behind him and setting his battered tan hat on his head. The five riders who Abilene had spied from the dining room window sat their horses around Spurr’s big roan, who stood tied to the hitchrack, thrashing his thick tail in guarded greeting.
    One of the newcomer’s horses was kind enough to pluck a bug of some kind from Cochise’s hindquarters, just behind Spurr’s blanket roll. Spurr did not recognize the man astraddle the thoughtful steeldust. He recognized only three of the five: Sheriff Dusty Mason of Willow City and two longtime Wyoming territorial marshals, Bill Stockton and Ed Gentry. The latter two were only a few years Spurr’s junior, warty oldsters in their own right.
    They were all looking at Spurr, though it was Mason himself who said, “I’d recognize this old cayuse of yours anywhere, but I couldn’t believe he was standing here and not over
there.
What happened—you get kicked out of the Bighorn?”
    “Hell, no,” Spurr said, walking down the porch steps. “I had me a civilized piece of cobbler and a cup of coffee.” He didn’t mention Abilene. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t.
    Mason scrutinized him from the saddle of his buckskin. “Don’t tell me you’ve given up drinkin’. Can you track sober?”
    “I can track standin’ on my head.”
    Mason gave a quick glance to the others. “Ed and Bill here tell me they’ve ridden a few trails with you before.
    “Hidy, Bill,” Spurr said, nodding. “Ed, you old ramshagger.”
    “Spurr, ya plug-ugly peckerwood. Figured some jealous jake would’ve gut-shot you by now.”
    Mason said, “These two’s Web Mitchell and Calico Strang. Wells Fargo detectives. Boys, this is Spurr Morgan.”
    “You don’t say,” said one of the Pinkertons, Calico Strang. Despite being clean-shaven, he had a greasy look that Spurr didn’t like, though he was properly attired in a wool vest, white silk shirt, and bowler hat. He might have been thirty, but his eyes were young and brash. He had buckteeth. Long copper hair dangled from his crisp, brown bowler. “I beg your pardon, Marshal, but I thought you were dead!”
    He looked at his partner, the taller and mustachioed and also properly attired Web Mitchell. Mitchell, appearing older, maybe thirty, smiled but not as brashly as his young partner.
    Spurr had grabbed Cochise’s reins off the