Mankiller, Colorado Page 5

  Tinny music came from each of the saloons, the competing tunes blending together to create a discordant racket. Men laughed and cursed. Women shrieked and cursed. A fat man in a derby and a gaudy checked suit stood outside the door of a gambling hall and bellowed, “Honest games! Honest games of chance!”

  Scratch leaned over in the saddle and asked Bo, “What do you reckon the odds are he’s tellin’ the truth?”

  Bo shook his head and said, “I wouldn’t bet a hat on it.”

  They passed a two-story frame building with a number of windows on the second floor where women in low-cut gowns leaned out and called obscene invitations to the men in the street. One of the soiled doves looked at Scratch and yelled, “Hey, handsome! You there in the buckskin jacket!”

  Scratch looked up at her and ticked a finger against the brim of his Stetson as he nodded. “Ma’am.”

  “Come on up here!” She squeezed her ample breasts together so that they seemed to be on the brink of spilling completely from her thin wrapper. “These’ll make you feel young again!”

  Bo and Scratch rode on, although Scratch sighed a little.

  “You’d be taking your life in your hands if you went in that place,” Bo told him.

  “Maybe so, but I’d be takin’ somethin’ else in my hands, too.”

  Bo laughed, pointed, and said, “There’s the sheriff’s office.”

  It was a blocky building made of the same sort of whipsawed planks that had been used in many of the other buildings in Mankiller. A sign nailed above the door read SHERIFF’S OFFICE AND JAIL. The sign was pocked with holes.

  Scratch frowned up at it as he and Bo reined in. “Those are bullet holes all over that sign, ain’t they?”

  “That’s what they look like,” Bo agreed.

  “Well, that don’t bode well. Seems like a lawman wouldn’t take it kindly if folks did that.”

  “Let’s go in and see if he’s there.”

  The Texans dismounted and tied their horses and pack animal at a hitch rail in front of the sheriff’s office. It was just about the only hitch rail in town that wasn’t already full up, Bo noted. In a boomtown like this, he was a little leery of leaving their supplies outside, so he said, “I’ll watch the horses. You can go inside and talk to the sheriff.”

  Scratch shook his head. “Let’s swap those chores around. You’re better at talkin’ to lawdogs than I am. I always feel like they’re suspicious of me, even when I ain’t done nothin’.”

  “That’s because you know you’ve gotten away with enough in your life that you always feel a little guilty,” Bo said with a smile.

  “Hey, if nobody saw me, they can’t prove I done it! And if I did, I had me a good reason.”

  Bo laughed and went to the door of the sheriff’s office. He opened it and stepped inside. The room was gloomy, choked with thick shadows. No lamp was burning, and the windows were so grimy they didn’t admit much light. Bo’s eyes adjusted quickly, though, and he stiffened as he spotted the figure sitting at the desk.

  The man was sprawled forward, his head twisted to the side and lying on a scattering of papers. Those papers were stained by the dark pool that spread slowly around the man’s head, as if his throat had been cut and his life was still seeping out.

  CHAPTER 7

  Bo backed away until he was standing in the doorway. His hand moved toward his gun, just in case any threat still lurked in here. The office was quiet and apparently deserted, though, except for the man sprawled on the desk.

  “Scratch!” Bo called over his shoulder. “Get in here.”

  Scratch was there instantly, alert for trouble. “What is it?”

  Bo nodded toward the desk.

  “Son of a bitch,” Scratch said. “You reckon he’s still alive?”

  “I don’t see how, with that much blood on the desk. But we’d better make sure.”

  They started forward warily, splitting up so that Bo went to the right of the desk and Scratch to the left. Bo glanced through an open door that led to a small cell block. He could see see into two of the cells. They were empty, and when he called, “Anybody back there?” no answer came from the cell block.

  “Who could’ve cut the sheriff’s throat in his own office?” Scratch asked in a low voice.

  “That’s assuming he’s the sheriff,” Bo pointed out. “We don’t know that.”

  “No, I reckon we don’t. But if he is, I wonder if he’s got any deputies. We’ll have to report this to somebody.”

  Bo nodded. “And hope that we don’t get blamed for it.”

  “Yeah, that’s just the way our luck runs sometimes, ain’t it?”

  They were at the desk now, and as both Texans leaned toward the body, Scratch suddenly sniffed and said, “Bo, somethin’s wrong here. Up close like this, that don’t really look like blood. It don’t smell like it, neither. In fact, it smells like—” Scratch reached out, dipped a finger in the dark pool, and lifted it to his nose. He sniffed again, then licked his fingertip. “Yep. Rum.”

  Bo sighed in mingled relief and disgust. “Yeah, I can see part of a flask lying there under him now. I guess—”

  The man chose that moment to give out with a loud, gasping snore that filled the office. He jerked, then lifted his head from the desk, having woke himself up.

  Seeing the two Texans standing there so close to him must have startled him, because he shoved his chair back so hard and abruptly that it started to tip over backward with him still in it. He waved his arms in the air frantically and yelled, “Whoa, Nelly!”

  Scratch grabbed hold of the man’s right arm while Bo caught the chair and kept it from tipping over. He righted it, causing the chair’s front legs to thump heavily on the floor. That threw the man sitting in it forward again, and only Scratch’s strong hand on his arm kept him for falling face-first on the desk again.

  The man’s bleary eyes opened wide at the sight of the dark, liquid pool on the desk. “Godfrey Daniel!” he cried. “What a catastrophic turn of events!”

  He wrenched free of Scratch’s grip with unexpected strength and leaned forward, plunging his face toward the desk so that he could start lapping up the rum like a dog.

  “Good Lord, man,” Bo said, completely disgusted now. “Don’t you have any self-respect?”

  The man glanced up at him and said, “There are some circumstances, sir, when shelf-respect is…is painfully inshufficient for a man’s needs.”

  Scratch went behind the chair and reached down to take hold of the man under each arm. He straightened, hauling the man up and out of the chair.

  “What you need is to have your head ducked in a water trough a few times, mister. You scared us outta some time we can’t afford to lose at our age!”

  “Take it easy, Scratch,” Bo advised as he caught sight of the tin star pinned to the man’s vest. “You’ll get arrested if you start manhandling the law.”

  “You mean this pathetic drunk really is the sheriff in these parts?”

  Bo leaned closer to peer at the badge in the bad light. “That’s what the tin star says, anyway.”

  “Un…unhand me, sir!” the drunken lawman demanded. “Or I’ll be forced to…to throw you in the calaboose!”

  Scratch lowered the man back into the chair. “Sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “I figured you must just be some drunk who wandered in from the street to sleep off a bender. I thought maybe we’d be doin’ you a favor by gettin’ you out of here before the real sheriff found you.”

  The man let out a huge belch, then grabbed hold of the desk’s edge with both hands as if the room had started spinning around him. “I…I am…the real sher’f. Sher’f O’Brien at your…your shervice. What can I…do for you two…fine gennelmen?”

  Sheriff O’Brien was a thickset man who wore a dirty flannel shirt that was missing a button so that some of his ample belly showed where it bulged against the garment. He had a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard and a thatch of graying hair that stuck up in wild spikes as if O’Brien had
run his fingers through it several times before passing out. The butt of a handgun stuck up from a holster attached to a gun belt strapped around his hips.

  Lawman or not, Bo wasn’t sure it was a good idea for somebody like this to be carrying a gun. O’Brien might shoot himself or somebody else without even knowing what he was doing.

  Bo looked around and spotted a battered old coffeepot sitting on a cast-iron stove in the corner. “You want a cup of coffee, Sheriff?”

  O’Brien shuddered. “Can’t stand coffee. Keeps me awake at night. Man with…an important job like mine…needs his sleep at night.” He peered at Bo and Scratch, looking back and forth between them. “Who…who are you? I don’t remember…don’t remember seeing you around our fine community before.”

  “That’s because we just rode in. He’s Scratch Morton. My name’s Bo Creel. We’re from Texas.”

  “Well, you’re welcome in Mankiller anyway.” O’Brien hiccupped. “Ever’body’s welcome in Mankiller. Bustling—hic!—bustling community.”

  Scratch looked at Bo and shook his head. “We’re wastin’ our time talkin’ to this fella. He’s drunk as a skunk. You won’t be able to get anything sensible outta him.”

  O’Brien leaned back in his chair and glared. “Drunk as a skunk, am I?”

  “That’s the way it looks to me.”

  O’Brien pointed a trembling finger at Scratch. “Don’t you…disreshpect the office of…of sher’f. I’m the…the law around here—”

  He stopped short, turned in his chair, and threw up all over the floor behind the desk.

  Grimacing, Bo said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll ask somebody else about those men and that so-called toll bridge.”

  He and Scratch had started toward the door when O’Brien grabbed hold of the desk again and pulled himself up. “Wait a minute!” he called. “Did you say…toll bridge?”

  Bo stopped and looked back. “That’s right.” He thought that the sheriff appeared slightly less drunk, probably because he had emptied his belly of all the rum he’d consumed earlier. “Two men stopped us at this end of the bridge over the river and demanded that we pay them a toll. Do they have a legal right to collect such a toll, Sheriff?”

  O’Brien blinked rapidly. “You…you paid ’em, didn’t you?”

  Scratch smiled and shook his head. “No, we sorta persuaded them to let us pass without payin’. Some .44 caliber persuasion, if you know what I mean.”

  O’Brien looked even sicker than he had a moment earlier. “Oh, no. Godfrey Daniel and all his thrice-damned brethren! You didn’t…you didn’t kill them, did you?”

  “It didn’t come to shooting,” Bo assured the lawman.

  “Yeah,” Scratch added, “they saw the light when they found themselves lookin’ down the barrels of our guns.”

  O’Brien groaned. “Oh, this is bad, this is bad.” He clawed his fingers through his hair in agitation. “Who was it? Did they tell you their names?”

  “Luke and Thad,” Bo supplied.

  “Oh, my Lord. Luke Devery is his pa’s firstborn son and right-hand man. Thad’s his cousin, from the crazy side of the family. You made them back down?”

  “They rubbed us the wrong way, I reckon you could say,” Scratch replied.

  Bo said, “I told them we’d check with the law, and if they have a legal right to collect a toll, we’d come back and pay them.” He shrugged. “Then we made them toss their shotguns in the bushes and get out of our way.”

  O’Brien leaned his elbows on the desk and covered his face with his hands. “Lemme think, lemme think,” he half-moaned. After a few seconds, he looked up at the Texans and went on, “Here’s what you need to do. Go up to the next block and over a block. You’ll see a place called Bradfield’s. You go in there and…and talk to Sam Bradfield.”

  “Who’s he?” Scratch asked.

  “The undertaker. He’s gonna need to size you boys up for coffins and find out what you want on your tombstones.”

  Bo and Scratch just looked at him for a moment, then Bo said, “You’re telling us that Luke and Thad are going to kill us.”

  O’Brien nodded. “Oh, yeah. Sure as a pig shits in a pen. Them and their relatives, they won’t let that pass.”

  “Well, no offense, Sheriff, but we’ll have something to say about that. And if you don’t want a lot of trouble in your town, you’d be wise to speak to those men and warn them.”

  “No, sir.” O’Brien shook his head. “I’m not going near the Deverys. We have an arrangement. I leave them alone, and they leave me alone. Actually, they, uh…sort of pretend that I don’t exist.”

  Bo bit back the words that sprang to his lips. He wanted to tell O’Brien that he was a not only a pathetic excuse for a lawman, but also a pathetic excuse for a man. Such a tongue lashing wouldn’t accomplish anything, though.

  “If anyone attacks us, Sheriff, we’ll defend ourselves.”

  O’Brien held up a shaking hand, palm toward Bo. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know anything about it.” He was frightened enough so that now he seemed half-sober, or only half-drunk, depending on how you wanted to look at it. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you boys are just passing through Mankiller?”

  “We heard about the gold strike,” Scratch said. “Figured to do some prospectin’.”

  O’Brien shook his head. “I was afraid you’d say that. Would you maybe…as a personal favor to me, maybe…consider riding on? Right now, maybe?”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Bo said, “except to get some rooms in one of the hotels and then maybe a good hot meal in one of the cafés.”

  Scratch smiled. “That sounds good to me, too.”

  “But you never did answer the question, Sheriff,” Bo went on. “Do the Deverys have a legal right to collect that toll?”

  “Some folks in town got together and built the bridge,” O’Brien muttered. “Before that there was just a rope bridge.”

  “Then the answer is no.”

  O’Brien shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. The Devery family owns a lot of land around here, including the part where the bridge ends.”

  “Well, then, in that case, maybe we should go back and pay them, like I said we would.”

  O’Brien gave Bo a bleak stare. “You really think that’s going to do any good now? You insult a couple of the Deverys, pull guns on them…Do you really think paying a few dollars is going to change anything?”

  Bo reached in his pocket, took out some coins, and counted out twelve dollars’ worth. He put them on the desk in front of O’Brien and said, “If Luke and Thad show up to make a complaint, Sheriff, you give that to them, understand? And if that’s not good enough to settle the debt…”

  “Then I reckon they’ll have to come find us,” Scratch finished in an equally grim voice.

  The two Texans turned and walked out of the sheriff’s office, leaving the badly shaken O’Brien behind them.

  When they reached the street, they paused. Now that they were out of earshot of the lawman, Scratch asked quietly, “You don’t reckon we ought to ride on like the man suggested, just to save ourselves some trouble, do you, Bo?”

  “I suppose it would have been a lot less trouble if you and I and Sam Houston and all those other fellas had just let Santa Anna go on about his business that day at Buffalo Bayou, wouldn’t it?”

  Scratch laughed. “Yeah, that’s about what I figured you’d say. The Good Lord seemed to be out of cut-and-run the day He made us, didn’t He?”

  “I’d say so.” Bo pointed diagonally across the street toward a building with a sign on it announcing BONNER’S CAFÉ. “That looks like a good place to eat. What say we get a surrounding before we go find a hotel?”

  “Lead the way,” Scratch said.

  CHAPTER 8

  They untied their horses and took the animals with them, threading their way through the crowds in the street. The hitch rail in front of the café was crowded, but there was just enough room left for
the Texans’ horses.

  A pair of doors with curtained windows in their upper halves led into the building. When Bo opened one of them, a mixture of delicious aromas floated out and washed over him and Scratch.

  Scratch paused to take a deep breath. He sighed and then asked, “Are you sure this is Mankiller and not heaven, Bo?”

  “I don’t reckon El Señor Dios would have a couple of mangy varmints like those Deverys trying to charge a toll to get into heaven, do you?”

  “Probably not,” Scratch agreed.

  They went inside and closed the door behind them. The place was busy, which testified that the flavor of the food matched its aroma. Most of the tables covered with blue-checked tablecloths were occupied, and every one of the stools at the counter running along the right side of the room was occupied. A couple of pretty waitresses in gingham dresses and white aprons were hurrying from table to table, delivering platters of food and taking orders. An older but still very attractive woman behind the counter refilled coffee cups for the men who sat there.

  Bo spotted an empty table. He pointed it out to Scratch, and they hustled to take it before anybody else could come into the café behind them and steal it out from under them.

  As they sat down and removed their hats, one of the fresh-faced waitresses came over to them. “Coffee and the special, gents?” she asked.

  Bo glanced at the chalkboard hung on the wall behind the counter. The special, written in lovely, flowing script, was roast beef, potatoes, carrots, peas, biscuits, and apple pie.

  “Oh, my, yes, ma’am,” Bo said, his mouth already watering. The prospect of such a meal after living on what he and Scratch could eat on the trail for a couple of weeks was very appetizing.

  “And keep the coffee comin’,” Scratch added.