The Edge of Violence Read online

  “He’s dead, ain’t he?” Eugene Harker whispered behind Reno.

  “Yeah.”

  The freedman came over and helped Reno roll the dead man over. The badge pinned to the lapel on Marshal B.B. Cutter’s coat reflected the light shining from inside The Blarney Stone and on the two lampposts on the columns before the gambling den’s doors. B.B. Cutter stared up at the night, but those eyes were dead now, seeing nothing.

  “Good night for you, darky!” O’Rourke’s heavy Irish brogue called out from the doorway to his crooked gaming house. “Another man to plant, come spring.” The gamblers flanking the big Irishman chuckled.

  “What happened?” That came from a newcomer. Mayor Jasper Monroe stepped into the mud, making his way through a parting sea of railroad stripes and mackinaw coats.

  “Your marshal got killed,” O’Rourke said. “In the line of duty, of course.”

  One of the gamblers, a bald man with shaded eyeglasses despite the darkness of midnight, hooked his thumb inside. “But he got the kid who killed him.”

  O’Rourke laughed again. “An even better night for you, darky,” he told Harker. “Two in one night. Violence is good for your business, boy.”

  Reno was staring at the freedman, and he saw something in Harker’s eyes that he admired and respected. But now was not the time. “Let it slide, Harker,” he whispered. “Been enough killing for one night.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harker managed to say stiffly.

  “There was a disturbance?” Mayor Monroe asked.

  O’Rourke and his gamblers laughed. So did a few chirpies who stood in what some folks might have called clothing, albeit not much clothing, beside the doors to The Blarney Stone. “Yeah, Mayor,” O’Rourke said, “I guess it was a disturbance.”

  “The man that killed your marshal is inside,” the gambler with hair, and two Colt revolvers in shoulder holsters, said. “We’d appreciate it if you’d fetch him out of here, boy. It puts a damper on the spirit of things inside our gem.”

  “Kid inside was drunk,” O’Rourke began. “Cutter there . . .” He gestured with an unlighted cigar at the corpse in the street. “He came in to arrest the boy. Got shot twice for his troubles. But Cutter put two bullets in his killer. All’s well that ends well, I guess, as the Bard said. A man murdered, but his murderer killed, too.”

  “With what?” Jed Reno rose, and this time aimed the Hawken from his hip in the general direction of Paddy O’Rourke.

  “You mind pointing that cannon elsewhere, Reno?” O’Rourke said.

  “With what?” Reno asked again. The barrel of the Hawken did not move.

  “What do you mean?” the bald gambler asked.

  This time, Eugene Harker answered. “Y’all say that Mr. Cutter here killed the man who killed him. Ain’t that right?”

  “That’s right,” the two-gunned gambler replied.

  “How? Cutter here . . . he didn’t even pack no gun.”

  “He had one tonight,” O’Rourke answered. “Isn’t that right?” The Irishman turned toward the gambler with the brace of Navy Colts.

  “That’s right.” The gambler pulled out his Navy. 36 from his left shoulder, and Reno slowly aimed the Hawken in that man’s direction. “This revolver.” He held the barrel under his nose. “Yep. This is the one. Fired two shots. Dropped it on the floor as he staggered outside to die in the street. I picked it up. Here.” He pitched the gun, which landed and sank through the snow that had yet to melt into mud.

  Reno spit onto the one step that came from the street to the boardwalk.

  “Reno,” O’Rourke said, “there are twenty witnesses inside who’ll swear that’s how things happened.”

  “That’s right. We swear. I swan, we swear.” One of the girls laughed. Jed Reno figured he could smell the opium from the girl from where he stood.

  “Let’s see the other,” Mayor Monroe said, and Jed Reno left the dead B.B. Cutter with Eugene Harker, and followed the procession inside.

  The light hurt his eyes. He had never been inside The Blarney Stone, especially not at night. It surprised him that not everyone had left the gambling parlor. Roulette wheels still spun. Dice rolled across felt tables. Glasses clinked, tobacco splashed in spittoons, and as soon as Reno pushed his way inside, the piano began playing again. It wasn’t crowded—not like the street—but it certainly was not dead.

  Except for the body on the floor near an overturned poker table.

  “Oh.” Reno stopped. The Hawken suddenly felt like a cannon, and he almost dropped it onto the muddy floor. He felt as if a Blackfoot spear had punched through both lungs and his heart. People stopped up short behind him, cursed, and went around him. The chirpy who had spoken outside—the one who Reno would have bet fifteen Cheyenne ponies that she had been smoking opium in one of those upstairs rooms—stepped around him, but this time she stopped.

  “Oh . . .” Her voice cracked. “Oh . . . my . . . goodness.”

  Another chirpy, one with red hair and a face heavy with rouge, came over, took the opium-dazed soiled dove, and practically led her to the staircase.

  By then, Eugene Harker had made his way inside, and was moving toward the corpse by the poker layouts. Jed Reno made his legs work and followed. He smelled whiskey and beer, sawdust, tobacco smoke; and as he neared the dead body, he smelled urine and excrement. The kid lay faceup, and like B.B. Cutter, his eyes were open, too. Sightlessly staring at the punched-tin ceiling.

  Reno dropped to the floor heavily, and pushed past Harker, touching the boy’s forehead, and then gently closing Ferre Slootmaekers’s blue eyes. The bullets that killed the sixteen-year-old farm boy, who had left the Dijlestad, also known as Mechelen, for a new life in America, had not been as well-aimed as the two that had killed Marshal Cutter. One in the stomach, another in the throat. The blood formed a lake around the kid’s body.

  “Does anybody know this . . . ?” Eugene Harker stopped, suddenly recognizing the kid. He stared, struck dumb, at Reno. In turn, Reno could barely nod.

  “The boy?” Mayor Monroe asked. “The boy killed Braxton.”

  Braxton, thought Reno. Braxton B. Cutter. Now he had learned the dead man’s name.

  “Aye,” O’Rourke answered. “He came in with a twenty-dollar gold piece. Started drinking the best rye we serve. Dottie was with him, but he . . . well . . . the kid didn’t have the ner ve.” Laughing evilly, O’Rourke looked around for Dottie, but Reno figured that was the one befuddled by opium who had been rushed upstairs.

  The Irishman kept talking. “Then the kid came to try his hand at poker. Boy couldn’t hold his liquor. Lost. Got angry. Started disturbing our place.”

  “That’s when your brave marshal came inside,” the bald gambler said. “The kid pulled a pistol. Got off two shots. And Cutter got his pistol and returned fire. Bam-bam-bam-bam. Just like that.”

  “We can hold a miner’s court if you like, Mayor,” O’Rourke said. “Not that we’re miners, or anything. Just an expression out here on the frontier.”

  “Where there’s no law,” said another gambler, one working a poker table a few feet behind Reno.

  “I reckon . . .” Monroe’s head shook. “There’s no need for that.”

  Reno leaned forward, closer to the dead boy’s white face, and came up, cursing himself. He smelled liquor on the boy, and those dead eyes were red-lined. Maybe he had come in to drink, spend that twenty bucks Reno had just paid him. Maybe he had gotten drunk. Maybe this never would have happened had Jed Reno not felt so damned generous. Maybe. A thousand maybes.

  He looked straight into Paddy O’Rourke’s eyes.

  “And where did Ferre get his pistol?”

  “Who?” O’Rourke asked.

  “The boy here. Ferre Slootmaekers. Kid never owned no pistol, wouldn’t even know how to shoot a damned Colt.”

  “Musta got lucky,” the two-gunned gambler said. “Because you could cover the two holes in Cutter’s back with a golden eagle.”

  Reno’s thumb started to pull ba
ck the hammer of the Hawken, but this time it was Eugene Harker’s hand that touched Reno’s forearm. Reno stared angrily at the freedman, until he heard the black man’s whisper.

  “Now ain’t the time, Mr. Reno.”

  Reno calmed himself. “And the pistol?”

  “He stole mine.” The gambler at the other poker table rose from his seat, and walked to the crowd, slowly withdrawing a Remington revolver, the barrel sawed off until it was barely a stub, from a holster near the small of his back. He spun the pistol expertly and handed it, butt forward, to Jasper Monroe.

  “I am sorry, truly, boss,” the gambler told O’Rourke, who grinned.

  “Aye, Dan. But such things happen. Such things happen in a town like Violence.”

  A smattering of laughs filled the parlor. Reno pushed himself up. He nodded at Ferre Slootmaekers. “I’ll be taking him to his folks’ farm. First thing in the morn.”

  “You do that,” O’Rourke said. “And tell the boy’s folks that their drinks will be on the house for all of next month. As a way of showing my condolences. We try to run a clean place here. Too bad their son had to soil The Blarney Stone’s reputation.”

  “Well,” Mayor Monroe said. “I guess that settles everything.”

  Reno stared at him. Decided that Monroe was either worthless, an idiot, or in O’Rourke’s back pocket now. Maybe, probably, all three.

  He walked outside, feeling a wetness in his eyes that he wasn’t sure when he had last felt. Before he got outside, however, he managed to kick over two spittoons, hoping those stains would be as hard to clean from The Blarney Stone’s floors as Ferre Slootmaekers’s blood.

  CHAPTER 11

  When he reached the trading post, he brought in more wood for the stove, found his bottle of bourbon, turned up the lantern, and found the Harper’s Weekly. Jed Reno’s book-learning had ended when he ran away from the Sneeds, back when he was fourteen or fifteen. Some of the big words he couldn’t quite manage, but he got most of the story figured out. Besides, the six pictures accompanying the article that fascinated him helped Reno figure out what the writer was trying to say.

  It made Jed Reno think. He had not heard from Tim Colter in years. Two letters in twenty-two years. One of those had been sent to Bridger’s trading post shortly after Reno had sent the boy off to join the rest of his people. Well, the kid’s ma and pa had been massacred, and his two sisters were with him, along with that gal he’d been sweet on and her mother. But the rest of the members of that wagon train had moved on, and so Reno watched the boy ride away.

  Boy? Hell, Tim Colter was a man by then. Even if he was only sixteen or seventeen or something like that.

  So that first letter had been short and sweet. The kid said they had arrived safely at the Willamette Valley, and that he and Patricia were engaged to be married. Tim wrote that Reno should come visit them anytime he wanted, that Oregon was beautiful country. Mostly, Tim Colter thanked Jed Reno for all he had done, saving his life, helping Tim rescue his family and girlfriend.

  Hell, that boy had saved Jed Reno’s hide—and more than once.

  Reno tried to remember....

  * * *

  It had all started at Bridger’s Fort, summer it had been, getting late in the season, too, back in ’45. Reno had gotten into quite a fight against a little rat named Malachi Murchison, who was in cahoots with another scoundrel, a half-Métis renegade named Louis Jackatars. Murchison had gotten away, and Reno rode after him.

  When Reno arrived at South Pass, he found another old trapper, Terrence “Just” Jenkins. Jenkins was a good man, but times being what they were back then, he had been reduced to guiding those damned fool emigrants across the Plains and Rockies to that promised land everyone called Oregon. Another wagon train had come upon the site of a massacre, being captained and guided by some half-wit whose name Reno had long forgotten. Just Jenkins had ridden back to check on a couple of wagons that had remained at South Pass for repairs. Those were the two wagons that had been ransacked.

  There were two graves, but neither Jenkins nor any of the men from the following wagon train had dug those. Man and wife—turned out to be Colter’s folks—were buried in one of the graves, and some gent named Scott—the pa of the girl Tim Colter had been sweet on—was in the other.

  Looked like Indians had done the deed, and not just one tribe. Jed Reno had met up with some Cheyenne Indians, and then, remembering what Murchison had told Reno, things started to make sense.

  If you looked at the sign, you would have thought that a confederation of many tribes—Cheyennes and Arapahos . . . Sioux and Blackfeet . . . Nez Perce and Shoshone . . . maybe even others—had killed those poor fools. But it had been Louis Jackatars and some of his renegades, red and white. Jackatars, a madman, had this plan to turn the Oregon Trail into the biggest graveyard ever known to mankind. Have a war going on, a war that would wipe out the Indians and ruin this land. This little massacre was that blackheart’s way of getting the war started.

  There had been another sign, and another body. Jackatars had left behind one of his men to kill a boy who must have survived the massacre. Only instead, that boy had killed the renegade, then set out—afoot—following the trail of Jackatars and his boys. That damned fool kid was going after his sisters and his girlfriend and his sweetie’s ma.

  Reno remembered what Just Jenkins had said of the kid. “Good boy, though greener than a tree frog.”

  A tree frog named Tim Colter.

  And Reno’s own words sang out from his memories: “Boy’s got a ton of guts. I’ll give him that.”

  The emigrants, being the fools that they were, wanted revenge. Get that war started. Wipe out all the redskins in the territories. Reno had sent them on to Bridger’s Fort, asking Jenkins to give him two weeks. Two weeks to stop a war. Two weeks to catch up with Louis Jackatars and kill that son of a bitch.

  So Reno rode north and west. He didn’t think he would find the Colter kid. Alive, that is.

  Yet, he had—with a thunderstorm about to flood the country, and the kid and another of Jackatars’s men, a rapscallion named Abaroa. Reno had shot down that dark-skinned killer. Reno had hoped to send the boy down to Bridger’s Fort, but the kid had other notions. He was coming with Reno, or going after Jackatars himself.

  Reno let him tag along. For a while, he regretted it. After all, he had to teach the boy how to shoot both rifle and pistol, how to saddle a horse, how to pack a mule, how to cook, clean, live, survive.

  They had made their way along the Big Sandy . . . and across the Red Desert . . . climbed into the mountains. . . found the Siskeedee-Agie, better known as the Green River. And had met up with three more of Jackatars’s killers, with one of those being Malachi Murchison. Oh, Jed Reno somehow survived that scrape, too; but with two arrows in him after those villains were dead, Reno was done for. He knew he would bleed to death, or the rot would set in, and he would die slow, painfully, from gangrene. Reno had been coherent enough to tell Tim Colter what to do, and the kid had managed to cauterize those ugly wounds, get the bleeding stopped, and even do some other pretty fine doctoring for a green tree frog.

  Reno woke up alive, but he wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  So the Colter boy had managed to fashion a travois, and they had taken off along the Green River, until they turned to climb through some of the most brutal mountains in this country that some folks were starting to call Wyoming. Finally they made it to the South Fork of the Shoshone River.

  And then they had gone straight to Hell.

  Colter’s Hell. Named for a mountain man who had hunted and trapped this country back when Jed Reno himself had been some snot-nosed kid in Bowling Green. People still talked about John Colter. Of course, Tim Colter was no relation to the famed trapper who had traveled for a spell with Lewis and Clark, but the green tree frog did fine enough.

  Colter’s Hell was a smelly pit of geysers and sulfur lakes and hot springs. Medicine country, some called it. Others found it bad medicine. That’
s where Louis Jackatars planned to trade his women captives to some Blackfeet Indians, and then load up on gunpowder and blow the country to another level of Hell.

  Jed Reno, Tim Colter, and some Cheyenne Indians had surprised Jackatars and his men. Colter had managed to make his way along a chasm carved by some of the foulest-smelling water known to man. He had gotten the girls out of there, safe and sound, while Reno had managed to kill Jackatars and blow up the gunpowder.

  The boy, the girls, and the Indians were supposed to have tried for Fort Union, way up on the Missouri near the Yellowstone. They’d be safe there. Well, that had been Reno’s plan, because he figured he would be killed in the explosion. But God favored fools.

  Reno caught up with them. He had planned to take the white greenhorns back to Bridger’s Fort so they could make their way on to Oregon. But Reno, the Cheyennes, and young Tim Colter had not killed all of Jackatars’s villains. Dog Ear Rounsavall, perhaps the meanest of the lot, had followed them. He had challenged Reno to a duel, but it was Tim Colter who accepted the fight.

  Now, that was a fight to remember. Reno had marveled at how much Tim Colter had grown. The boy killed Dog Ear Rounsavall, pretty easily, too. So they had returned to Bridger’s trading post, said their good-byes, and Tim Colter had left Reno’s life.

  * * *

  Left his life forever.

  Reno gripped the bottle, and took another pull of bourbon. Of course, it didn’t have to be forever. The kid had invited Reno to come visiting, but Reno had never been much for visiting. He figured his home was in the Rockies. Carson, Bridger, and many other trappers—even Terrence “Just” Jenkins—had been back to St. Louis, or at least Independence, but never Jed Reno. He always said he had been born . . . reborn, maybe . . . in this country.

  “That country,” Reno corrected himself. Violence, Idaho Territory, lay maybe three hundred miles east of Fort Bridger. Probably two hundred to maybe even five hundred miles from where he had trapped all those years in the Rockies.

  He corked the bottle, and looked back in the storeroom, which also served as his bedroom, his living quarters. A couple of older ledgers lay somewhere beneath the old hides, robes, and some of his trapping equipment. If his memory was right, and there was no guarantee after drinking three-quarters of a bottle of bourbon, he had stuck the second letter Tim Colter had written him in one of those old books.