The Black Hills Read online

  The Gypsy tarot card reader, Madame Marcollini, stood outside her wood-framed tent, smoking an opium pipe. She was a round-bodied Italian with a prune-like face gaudied up with too much lipstick and rouge, her thick, black hair swept back under a purple turban trimmed with an ostrich feather.

  Wearing a dress of dyed sackcloth and fur-trimmed slippers, she leaned against her tent’s doorframe, drawing on the long, slender pipe, then exhaling slowly, dreamily. The cloying odor of the midnight oil reached Stillwell’s nose, and he wrinkled his nostrils against it.

  On a low table by the door lounged a cat with golden eyes and long, charcoal fur.

  “Care for a reading, Sheriff?” the Gypsy asked.

  “Go to hell, you old devil,” Stillwell said, and continued trudging through the sage, toward a line of large business buildings looming straight ahead, their backsides facing him, abutted with piles of split firewood.

  Behind him, the Gypsy laughed very quietly and raspily as though in collusion with the dark demon inside of the sheriff himself.

  Stillwell made his way over to the rear of the largest hotel in town—the Dakota Territorial—in which he kept a room. Since the hotel was on the opposite end of town from the jailhouse, he hoped that no one here had yet gotten word about the shoot-out. If you could call it that.

  It had been a bloody massacre. One in which Stillwell had taken no part except to back-shoot one of his own fleeing deputies. Otherwise, he’d run.

  Humiliation burned inside his head as he entered through one of the large, barrack-like structure’s two rear doors. This door opened into one side of the large kitchen in which two black cooks and one old Sioux cook clad in white smocks and chef’s hats were tending bubbling pots and kneading biscuit dough. They glanced at Stillwell with dull-eyed interest and then resumed their work, indicating that they were probably ignorant of the festivities on the other end of town.

  Relief eased some of the tension that made his shoulders ache. So far, so good.

  He pushed through the swinging door into a hall that extended past the main, carpeted stairs rising to the hotel’s second and third floors. Ahead was the hotel’s large, well-appointed saloon with its heavy, round wooden tables, a gambling layout to one side, and a large, ornate horseshoe bar coming up on Stillwell’s left.

  As he’d both hoped and expected, the saloon was sparsely populated this time of the day. Only a couple of tables were occupied—maybe eight men total—and they appeared deeply involved in conversations that had nothing to do with the massacre. At least, they didn’t seem to be talking about Stillwell. A couple of men glanced toward the sheriff, but they were fleeting glances. They did not stare.

  That relieved Stillwell a little as well. He wouldn’t linger here. He just wanted to get up to his room. First things first.

  He turned to the bar. Hank Mitchum was just coming around from the far side of the mirrored island bar with a crate of liquor bottles in his big, fat hands, his puffy face flushed from exertion. Now the bartender stopped and stared at Stillwell in surprise.

  “Frank!”

  Mitchum knew. Stillwell’s pulse quickened.

  “Bottle, Hank. The usual. Then I want you to do me a favor.”

  Mitchum just stood at the end of the mirrored island, gazing at Stillwell with concern and . . . something else. What? Amusement? Was that mockery building slowly in the beefy bartender’s dark-blue eyes?

  “Jesus, Frank, I heard about—”

  “Shut up!” Stillwell glanced behind him to make sure no one at the occupied two tables was listening. He hardened his jaws as he leaned forward and glowered at Mitchum. “A bottle, Hank. The usual. The good stuff.”

  “All right, Frank. All right.”

  As Mitchum set his crate on the back bar counter and tramped off in search of Stillwell’s preferred coffin varnish, Stillwell grabbed a notepad and a stubby pencil from off the bar to his left, and slid it toward him. He flipped through to a clean leaf, quickly scribbled a note, ripped it out of the pad, and turned it facedown atop the bar.

  He brushed his fist across his nose, glanced behind him once more. He’d caught one of the men staring at him. The man sat at a table not far from the large, open arched doorway to the hotel lobby. Four others sat at the same table. The man in question was big and broad shouldered, with curly red hair, a thick red neck, and arms like those of an ape.

  As his gaze met Stillwell’s, he turned his head quickly away and rejoined the conversation at his table.

  Stillwell narrowed his eyes at him, suspicious. Slowly, anger kindled in him. It was a good feeling. It shoved away a little of the fear that still had his knees feeling like mud.

  The man who’d been staring at him—his name was Willie Jackson, a mule skinner and part-time shotgun guard for the Cheyenne to Deadwood Line—glanced at Stillwell out of the corner of his left eye. Jackson’s pitted, sunburned cheeks flushed slightly as he quickly returned his gaze to the others at his table. He leaned forward to say something to the man sitting directly across from him, and both men laughed quietly.

  “Here you go,” Mitchum told Stillwell, setting a fresh bottle of Maryland rye onto the bar and prying up the cork with a jackknife. “Fresh bottle, just came in.”

  “Put it on my tab,” Stillwell said, grabbing the bottle as well as a glass off a near pyramid. He turned the glass up and carelessly splashed whiskey into it, overfilling it so that a good bit of the rye washed over the sides.

  “What the hell happened out there, Frank?” Mitchum asked. “I heard that all of your—”

  Stillwell had tossed back half of the whiskey. Now he glared sidelong at Mitchum, who stood regarding him with his mouth open, his words cut off in mid-sentence, the question lingering in his eyes.

  The sheriff slid the scrawled note over to the barman. “Take that over the Western Union office. Have the telegrapher send it out pronto. You can add that to my tab too.”

  Mitchum turned the note faceup and then scowled up at Stillwell, shocked. “Dakota Jack?”

  “I didn’t say you could read it, Hank. I told you to send it.” Stillwell threw back the last of his rye, then grabbed the bottle off the bar and stuffed it into his coat pocket. “When you get back, tell Jane to haul water up to my room. I want a bath.” Jane Campbell was the pretty young saloon girl and dancer Stillwell had staked a claim to.

  “A bath?” Mitchum looked at him as though he’d suddenly grown a second head. “Now? Your men are layin’ dead out in—!”

  “Yes, now!” Fury exploding in Stillwell, he grabbed the bartender by his shirt collar, jerked the man’s large, beefy head toward him. “A bath, goddamnit, Hank!” the sheriff shouted, his words echoing around the cavern-like room. “Why are you still here? I thought I sent you over to the Western Union office!”

  He gave the barman a violent shove. Mitchum staggered backward, red faced. He got his feet settled, then straightened his collar and stared indignantly across the bar at Stillwell.

  The sheriff was suddenly, dreadfully aware that silence had filled the saloon. He looked into the back bar mirror. All heads in the room were turned toward him.

  The burn of embarrassment rose in him.

  Quickly, stumbling a little over his own feet, he moved away from the bar. He kept his eyes from the men sitting at the two tables. Keeping his head down, wanting to run as fast as he could, he compelled himself to take one step at a time as he slowly climbed the stars, brushing his left hand across the banister. He had his right hand on the bottle in his coat pocket.

  God, how I need another drink!

  Silence welled from below and behind him until a snickering voice said, “. . . ran like a donkey with its tail on fire!”

  Men snorted their laughter.

  Halfway up the stairs, Stillwell stopped.

  He could hear his heart beating in his ears.

  Slowly, he turned to face the room.

  The snickering stopped. The men who’d been laughing at the table near the doorway to the l
obby glanced uncomfortably toward Stillwell. They cleared their throats, brushed fists across their mouths or noses, sipped their beers, drew nervously on cigars or cigarettes.

  Stillwell dropped back down the stairs. His held his chin down. His eyes were dark as coals under his high, bulging forehead. He crossed the room slowly and stopped at the table near the door.

  All five men sitting there stared up at him now. The laughter was gone from their eyes. It had been replaced by incredulity tossed with a goodly portion of apprehension. All eyes flicked toward the big, handsome Colt Peacemaker residing on the sheriff’s right thigh and over the ivory handle on which his right hand was draped.

  Willie Jackson sat with his back to Stillwell, but he had his head turned and was looking up at Stillwell now, a half-smoked Indian Kid cigar smoldering between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. His thick lips set inside a tangled, dark red beard twitched an edgy, cowering smile.

  No one at either table now said anything. All eyes were on Stillwell. Mitchum remained behind the bar, staring warily toward Stillwell and the five men at the table near the lobby.

  Stillwell looked at Jackson staring up at him with drink-glassy eyes. “What’s so funny?”

  “What, uh . . . what’s that?” Jackson said.

  “I asked what’s funny?”

  Jackson glanced at the man sitting directly across from him—Bernard Wise, a crony of Jackson’s who worked as a farrier for the stage line but also sold meat to local eateries from game he shot in the Hills.

  Jackson turned his head to stare back up at Stillwell. A single sweat bead trickled into his beard.

  He hiked his thick left shoulder. “Noth-nothin’, Frank.”

  “Sheriff Stillwell.”

  “Wh-what’s that?”

  “It’s Sheriff Stillwell.”

  “Yeah, right—Sheriff Stillwell.”

  “I’m going to ask you again,” Stillwell said, keeping his voice very low and taut. “What’s so funny?”

  Jackson’s lips twitched another nervous smile. “Like I said . . . Sheriff Stillwell . . . nothin’s funny.”

  “Look, Frank,” Bernard Wise said, rising from his chair, hands up, palms out, “you got no truck with us. We was just talkin’ about what happened down the street.”

  “That’s all we was talkin’ about, Frank,” Jackson said, slowly, carefully. “Just chewin’ over the news is . . . wait, wait, hold on, Frank!”

  Jackson leaped up out of his chair.

  Stillwell had clawed his .45 from its holster and raked the hammer back.

  “I told you the name’s Sheriff Stillwell, you big, ugly, filthy son of a mule!” The big Colt bucked in the sheriff’s hand, lapping orange flames across the table.

  The Colt roared three times, all three bullets plowing into Jackson’s chest and sending the man stumbling backward, grunting and screaming as blood spewed out the exit wounds in his back. He fell backward over a table behind him, rolled across it, smearing blood across its surface, and dropped to the floor with a heavy thud on the table’s other side.

  Bernard Wise cursed shrilly as he reached for the old Remington holstered on his right hip.

  He didn’t get the Remington clear of its holster before Stillwell emptied his big Colt into Wise’s chest from point-blank range. The roaring hogleg was so close to Wise that the man’s shirt caught on fire.

  As Wise twisted around and flew backward onto the table he’d been sitting at, and from which the other men scrambled, heading out the door, flames engulfed him, licking up from his chest and filling the room with fetid smoke.

  “Good God!” Mitchum bellowed.

  The barman came running out from behind the bar, wielding a bar towel. He brushed past Stillwell to bat the towel at the chest of Bernard Wise, who lay back down atop the table, on cards and shot glasses and scrip and specie, twitching as he died.

  “Jesus, Frank—what’s got into you?” Mitchum cried, dousing the last of the flames with the towel and wrinkling his nose at the stench of cordite and burning flesh and blood. “You’re gonna burn down my place an’ half the town!”

  “Just wanted to make myself clear,” Stillwell said, backing away from Mitchum and the men he’d just taught lessons they’d never forget. Don’t mess with Frank Stillwell. He glanced at the men at the other table. All stared at him, frightened and speechless.

  Stillwell kept backing toward the stairs. “The name’s Sheriff Stillwell. No one best forget that.”

  Stillwell dropped the smoking Colt back into its holster, swung around, placed his hand on the bottle in his coat, and headed up the stairs.

  CHAPTER 10

  Annabelle Ludlow trotted the buckskin along a bend in the two-track trail northeast of Tigerville. It was good and dark, the sky sprinkled with stars, and she was late getting home to supper.

  An owl hooted in the pine-studded hills rising darkly on her left, but it wasn’t the owl that caused her to pull back on the buckskin’s reins. When the horse stopped, Annabelle curveted the mount and swung her head around to stare along her back trail.

  She’d heard something. She’d heard it before, roughly fifteen minutes ago, after she’d skirted the town of Tigerville and had swung the buckskin onto the trail to the Broken Heart, her father’s ranch. She wasn’t sure what the sound had been then or now, but it had sounded strange. Unnatural. Not a sound made by any forest creature.

  It came again now very faintly—the soft clink of a spur or possibly a bridle chain. It hadn’t originated along the trail behind her but on a hill to the north of the trail, on her right now as she looked back.

  Annabelle’s heart quickened. “Hello?”

  Nothing. Just the sound of the slight breeze scratching branches together and brushing the tall, tawny grass growing thick along the shoulders of the haystack buttes.

  Very faintly, a horse blew from the same direction from which the other sound had come.

  The buckskin looked back and gave a shrill whinny, shaking its head and rattling its own bit and bridle chain.

  “Easy, boy, easy,” Annabelle said, patting Ivan’s withers reassuringly, though she herself was feeling a good bit of apprehension.

  She looked up the hill on her right and called, “Is someone there?”

  Still nothing. Chicken flesh rose along Anna’s arms and across her shoulders, and it wasn’t because of the chill that had descended over the Hills soon after the sun had set. She felt as though someone were watching her, staring at her from the concealment of the darkness shrouding the near butte.

  “Who’s there?” Anna called, putting some steel in her voice now.

  Again, nothing.

  But she could feel those eyes on her. Ogling her.

  Suddenly, a horse whinnied. A shadow moved atop the hill. The shadow separated from the hill itself and the tall pines peppering it. The shadow took the shape of a horse and rider.

  The horse reared, lunging up off its front hooves, which it clawed at the sky. It whinnied again, and its eyes shone blue with reflected starlight while the rest of the mount, including its rider, remained in the concealment of silhouette.

  The horse dropped its front hooves back to the ground. The rider reined it sharply to the right, away from Anna and the buckskin. The horse galloped off across the top of the bluff and disappeared down the other side, the thudding of its hooves fading gradually until the girl could hear only the natural night sounds of the forested mountains once more.

  Annabelle’s heart raced, skipping beats.

  Who on earth . . . ?

  She pointed the buckskin up the trail and batted her heels against its flanks. The horse was obviously as chilled by the shadow rider as Anna herself had been. Ivan shot straight up the trail, pinning his ears back. Knowing his own way home, he automatically swung off the main trail onto the secondary one, which led to the ranch yard, and galloped up and over the last hill.

  Beyond Anna lay the lodge of her father’s Broken Heart Ranch halfway up the distant, low o
pposite hill, two hundred yards beyond. The sprawling house’s lamplit windows showed soft umber glows in the heavy darkness, as did the small windows of the bunkhouse down the hill to its left.

  The bunkhouse sat near the hay and stock barns, corrals and other outbuildings, including a blacksmith shop, springhouse, and summer kitchen—all shadowy figures in the night. The lowing of cattle sounded from the surrounding hills, and the cool night air was rife with the aroma of summer-cured hay and the not unpleasant smell of cow and horse dung. At least, such smells were not unpleasant to Annabelle Ludlow, who’d been born and raised on the Broken Heart and who’d been riding horseback since she was five years old, having taken to horses the way “lambs take to their mother’s tit,” as her father once put it.

  The buckskin galloped under the ranch portal whose wooden crossbar bore the Broken Heart brand as well as the Ludlow name. When she’d halted the sweaty, blowing horse at one of the stock barns, Annabelle turned the buckskin over to one of the two Mexican hostlers still working in the barn and adjoining corral by the soft glow of two railroad lanterns.

  “Give him plenty of oats, will you, Carlos?” Annabelle said, patting Ivan’s long, sleek snout, then pressing her lips to it. “He’s had a long day.”

  Ivan switched his tail affectionately.

  “Sí, señorita,” the hostler said, leading the horse away.

  Anna shook her hair out from her collar and headed along the path toward the house, removing her fringed riding gloves. Her mind was still on the shadow rider who’d spooked her. She stopped and turned back to the hostler.

  “Carlos?”

  The man, who’d just led the horse up the ramp and through the barn’s large double doors, turned back to Anna, he and the horse now silhouetted by the flickering lamplight behind them. The second hostler was forking out a stall, pitching the hay and dung into a large wooden wheelbarrow.