The Big Showdown

Chapter One

Caleb York was getting out of town on the noon stage. Despite his reputation as a deadly gunfighter, York was not being run out of Trinidad, New Mexico, by the sheriff. After all, until very recently, York had been the sheriff here himself, a position he’d held down for six months until a replacement could be found for the previous holder of that office.

It was the least York could do for the dusty little community, considering he’d killed the man.

Not that Sheriff Harry Gauge hadn’t needed killing — a petty tyrant seeking to become a cattle baron, a ruthless murderer that the West was well rid of. But removing Gauge from the Trinidad scene, on the heels of a cowpox epidemic, had left the town in something of a topsy-turvy mess. The Trinidad Citizens Committee had asked York to pick up Gauge’s badge, wipe the filth from it, and pin it on. At least for a while.

This York had done.

But now he’d found a suitable replacement in his old friend Ben Wade, who’d been a lawman in Kansas and Arizona, working alongside the likes of the Earp brothers and Bat Masterson. Even at fifty-some, Wade was twice the man of most anyone he was likely to come up against.

Right now York was walking down the boardwalk, its awning shading him from morning sun, mercilessly bright in a clear sky, though the temperature on this dry, lightly breezy September morning was around sixty degrees. He was on his way to the office that had been his till he turned it over to Wade last week.

Townspeople nodded at York, and he nodded back, casting smiles at the men, tipping his hat to the ladies. He was unaware that many of the latter turned to look at him as he passed, with wistful smiles and the occasional girlish giggle. Even from the older ones.

York indeed made a fine figure of a man, long of leg, broad of shoulder, firm of jaw, his hair reddish brown, his face clean-shaven, his features pleasant, rawboned, with washed-out blue eyes that peered out a permanent squint. He had settled easily into that vague space between thirty and forty when a man was at his best and, in the case of a Caleb York, his most dangerous. His Colt Single Action Army .44 rode his right thigh at pocket level, the holster tie loose and dangling; his spurs sang an easygoing, jingling song.

When he’d ridden into town last year, those who didn’t know how to look at a man saw only a dude, and York still dressed in a manner unlike either the cowhands of the surrounding ranches that Trinidad served, or the shopkeepers who did the serving. York considered his somewhat citified attire professional, and it reflected the time he’d spent in big cities like Denver and Tucson.

But even Trinidad’s few professional men — Doc Miller, the bankers, the lawyers — did not approach the sartorial flair of Caleb York, who wore black as did they, only with touches of style — gray trim on collars and cuffs, gray string tie, twin breast pockets, pearl buttons down his shirt, black cotton pants tucked into hand-tooled black boots, curl-brimmed black hat with cavalry pinch, gray kerchief knotted at the neck.

But ever since Caleb York had gunned down Gauge and half a dozen of his hardcase deputies, no one in Trinidad had called him “dude.”

If pressed, he’d have admitted that he would miss this prospering little town of three hundred, and the surrounding ranchers and their families and hands who kept it thriving. Not that there was anything particularly special about the place.

One end of Main Street — the dust kept down by a layer of sand brought in from the nearby Purgatory River — was home to a white wooden church, the other end a bare-wood livery stable, steeple and high-peaked hayloft mirroring each other. Between them was a typical collection of businesses — hardware store, apothecary, barber, hotel with restaurant, telegraph, saloon, café — false-fronted clapboards and now and then a brick building, like the bank.

As he neared the livery stable, York felt a twinge — his black-maned, dappled gray gelding was in a stall within that homely structure. The blacksmith, Clem Wiggins, would sell the steed and wire the proceeds to him in San Diego. It might take a while, because the animal was worth a small fortune — less than five hundred would be horse theft. But even twice that couldn’t make up for the loss of a loyal steed like that.

He doubted he’d even need a horse in San Diego. That would likely be a city where you either walked or hopped an electric streetcar. Where the only horses you saw were attached to buggies or milk wagons. A different world, but a world he needed to learn to live in.

He was nearing the scarred, bullet-pocked adobe building that wore a high-up sign saying SHERIFF’S OFFICE AND JAIL. Across the way was a handful of smaller adobes, the homes and businesses of the town’s modest Mexican population. He took the few steps up to the wooden porch, sheltered by an awning, and knocked at the rough-wood door, a solid thing that could help make the office a fortress when need be.

“It’s open!” a deep voice boomed.

York went in and took off his hat.

The office was a plank-floored space with two barred windows onto the street, a wood-burning stove, and a rough-hewn table overseen by a wall of wanted posters and a rack of rifles. This was at left; at right was a big dark wooden desk with a chair behind it and a man in the chair.

Ben Wade was white-haired and white-mustached and wore his white flat-brim, Canadian-creased hat indoors as well as out, probably to hide where he was balding. Wade was a mite touchy about his age, since most gunfighters didn’t live as long as he had. The lawman had a well-fed look that replaced the leanness York had first known in him, when Wade was a deputy marshal in Dodge City.

Wade, in a light blue shirt and tan cowhide vest, was making a cigarette. “Find a chair, Caleb,” he said.

York pulled one up and sat down. “Nice to see a geezer like you with such a steady hand.”

The sheriff licked the paper, finished making the smoke, and fired it up with a kitchen match. Waved it out. “You’re not that young yourself, friend.”

“No. I’m not. That’s why I’m headed to the big town.”

Wade shuddered. “Exactly where I don’t want to be. Six years in Denver, working as a hotel house dick. You don’t want to know the horrors I seen.”

“Pay was good.”

“Costs plenty living in a big town. You’ll see. But your loss is my gain.”

York gestured toward a window. “It’s a decent little town, Ben. Your biggest worry is the handful of Gauge’s men who’re still out there. Gunnies pretendin’ they’re ranch hands.”

He nodded. “You told me such enough times that I’m startin’ to pay attention. But ex-gunnies have to make an honest living, too. Times have changed. Times are changing.”

“Not that much, Ben, not in Trinidad. Maybe over in Las Vegas, since the train come in. But this little town — could be twenty years ago, and you’d never know it.”

“Cowboys still get drunk on payday,” Ben said, with a deep chuckle and nod of agreement, “and kids who read too many dime novels will always try to play gunfighter. And die young like those who went before them.”

“Old gunfighters who hang on too long, they die, too. Don’t forget that, Ben.”

“Judas Priest, Caleb,” the sheriff said, letting out blue smoke, leaning forward. “You got in touch with me. You got sudden second thoughts about leavin’ this little slice of heaven? You tryin’ to talk me out of this job? You want this badge, son, you’ll have to rip it off my shirt. Because I am right where I want to be.”

“How does Hazel feel about it?”

He flinched, took another deep draw on the smoke. “She’s, uh... not happy. She likes her house in Denver. She likes her creature comforts. Our son and his daughters live there, you know.”

“Hell, I didn’t mean to bust up your happy home.”

Wade shook his head. “She’ll get over it. One of these days, the stage’ll pull up and she’ll step off. Mark my words. She was beautiful once, but now she’s old and fat like me. She knows I’m the only man on God’s good earth who looks at her with eyes that still see beauty. She’ll show.”

York twitched half a frown. “I hope you’re right. I don’t need that on my conscience.”

Wade’s laugh exhaled smoke. “Since when does Caleb York have a conscience? How many men you put down, anyways?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

Wade’s mustached grin filled a bunch of his face. “Sure you do, son. Only the crazy ones don’t keep track. You’re hard, but you ain’t crazy. How many?”

“...Twenty-seven.”

“Countin’ the war?”

“Not counting the war, Ben. You never really know in war how many you put down.”

“How do you sleep at night?”

“Fine.”

“Bad dreams?”

“Only if I got a fever.”

“Good. So I guess I can risk troubling your damn conscience. I got the job I want — this is how I want to spend my last working years. With a badge and a gun and a desk and a chair... and a hundred a month. More than that, with my cut of the taxes I collect.”

“Much more. It’s a good-paying job. I’m glad you’re pleased. I hope Hazel comes around.”

Wade was nodding. “She’ll come around. She’ll step off that stage. You’ll see.”

“Speaking of stages,” York said, and stood. “I have one to catch, in about an hour.”

Wade gave York another face-splitting grin. “I have a bottle in this desk, if it ain’t too early for you. You can spend the rest of your time in Trinidad tellin’ me how sorry you are you got me this job I so dearly wanted.”

York grinned back, snugging on his hat. “No, I have an early lunch date.”

“Certain pretty gal?”

“Certain pretty gal.”

“And I reckon she’s not real happy with you, is she, son?”

“No. Not happy at all.”

“Well, then that’s a knack we share.”

“What is?”

“Disappointin’ our womenfolk.”

York gave his old friend a smile and a nod, then went back out into the pleasant morning. Last night, however, had not been so pleasant. That was when he’d told Willa Cullen that he would be leaving at noon today.

Both Willa and her father had been seated at the big carved Spanish-style dining-room table in the rustic ranch house of the Bar-O. They were having coffee in china cups.

Willa, typically, wore a red-plaid shirt and denims, her straw-yellow hair up and braided in back. Her mother had been Swedish and that came through in pretty features and an hourglass figure. Tall, sturdy of frame, Willa was feminine, but in a Viking kind of way. And right now she looked like she’d be pleased to send him to Valhalla.

Or maybe someplace more southern-ward.

Seated across from York, she met his news with cold eyes and flaming cheeks. At the head of the table sat her father, George Cullen, his white hair thin as desert grass, his eyes milky with blindness.

A big man made smaller by time, Cullen wore a white shirt and a black string tie, his strong, white-mustached face undercut by sunken cheeks, his flesh gray from too much time of late spent indoors. Blind men did not ride the range with their cowhands, no matter how much they might want to.

The old man was first to respond. “I’m disappointed, my boy. I reckoned you and Willa here... I’d hoped...”

York said nothing, looking away from the man’s milky gaze.

Cullen stuck out his hand, still rough from work, despite how little of it he’d been able to do these last few years. York shook the man’s hand. Across from him, Willa was a pretty stick of dynamite trying not to explode.

“Won’t be the same around here,” Cullen said. “We’ve come to think of you as part of the family. Be that as it may, we remain in your debt. Without you, this ranch would be lost to us. That cur Harry Gauge might well be sitting here, where I am... and I would be under the ground.”

“Hard to say,” York said. “Your men were there, backing you. In a pinch, the townspeople came through. But I’m happy to have pitched in.”

Willa’s hands were clenched into small, trembling fists, held before her on the table like those of a child about to throw a tantrum. The red was fading from her cheeks, but her chin was crinkling and trembling and her eyes were tearing up.

Cullen was smiling, his blank eyes looking past York. “You know, my boy, I thought perhaps I might make a rancher out of you. With no son of my own...”

“You have Willa. She can run this ranch. She’d be better at it than most men. Maybe any man... because you raised her, Mr. Cullen.”

Tears were rolling down the young woman’s cheeks, but she made no effort to wipe them away, her hands still fists.

“You may be right,” Cullen said. “But it’s a hard road for a woman to travel alone. I won’t be here forever. She’d be better with a man at her side. And perhaps one day she’ll find herself one.”

Willa got up, her chair scraping on the floor like a wheel coming off a wagon, startling her father, who bounced in his chair some.

Cullen said, “Girl!”

But she was already out of the room.

York said, “She’s upset with me.”

Cullen smiled. “Well, I don’t need eyes to see that, son. Let her cool off some. Are you heading to San Diego? To that Pinkerton position you meant to fill, afore you got sidetracked in Trinidad?”

“That’s right, sir. I’d be number two man in the office, but I won’t be abandoned behind a desk. I’d be leading investigations. I’d be out on manhunts.”

“I hope you know I wish you the best of luck. Should you get out there and it don’t suit you, come back here to us. You’ll always have a place at this table, and in our hearts.”

York rose and rested a hand on the old man’s shoulder and squeezed. Cullen put his hand on York’s and squeezed back.

“Don’t you go forgetting us now,” the old man said.

“Not hardly.”

She was on the porch in the moonlight. The ivory of it suited her. She’d wiped away the tears now, but her lush full lips were trembling.

“I’m sorry to just spring it on you,” York said. “But you knew that I was just taking the sheriff post temporary.”

She nodded. Swallowed. She either didn’t want to speak to him or couldn’t.

He risked a tiny smile. “Would you do a thoughtless lout a small favor?”

She glared at him.

“See me off tomorrow? The stage leaves at noon. Maybe we could have a late breakfast or early lunch — around eleven, there at the hotel?”

She said nothing.

“Would you do that for me, sweetheart?”

She turned toward him, eyes and nostrils flaring like a rearing horse. He might have slapped her, judging by the reaction.

But then she’d done something truly surprising: she nodded, and rushed back inside the ranch house.

When he exited the sheriff’s office, York almost bumped into a familiar figure, standing there waiting like an eager puppy dog: that old desert rat Tulley, skinny and white-bearded, but that beard barbered now, and the baggy canvas pants washed in recent memory and under blue suspenders a clean BVD top. The bowlegged town character had dried out, at York’s encouragement.

“I seen ya go in there,” Tulley said in the good-natured rasp that was what was left of a voice ravaged by years of smoke and drink. “You don’t think I’d let ya leave town without an adios, do you, Sheriff?”

The unlikely friendship between the two men had grown out of Tulley befriending the stranger who’d ridden into town and into the middle of nasty doings.

“I’m not the sheriff anymore,” York reminded him.

“And a damn shame! Damn shame all around. You had a good thing goin’ in this here hamlet, Sheriff. Good pay, respect, folks looked up to ye... and then there’s that yellow-haired gal. You know when ol’ Cullen finally up and croaks, that ranch’ll be hers. You do know what you’re walkin’ out on, don’t you?”

“I know, Tulley.”

“And friends like Jonathan R. Tulley don’t grow on trees neither, you know.”

“I suppose not.”

Tulley’s face clenched like a fist. “Then to hell with you, Caleb York. I may jus’ go back to drinkin’, jus’ find me a bottle and crawl back in, and whose fault will it be?”

“Mine?”

“Yours! Your and yours alone. So to hell with you, you selfish son of a bitch.”

Then Tulley gave York a big, startling hug, and almost ran back to the stable. He might have been crying.

York was laughing, gently. Who’d ever have thought that that old reprobate would be one of the things he’d miss most about Trinidad?

He walked back to the hotel where he checked out and left his packed carpetbag with Wilson, the weak-chinned, pince-nez-sporting clerk who’d given him a register to sign, all those months ago. The .44 in its holster with cartridge-laden gun belt was tucked in the bag, right on top. No need for a weapon on his hip, riding on a stage or a train, not in these times. Why not be comfortable?

At eleven A.M., the hotel dining room, with its dark wood, fancy chairs, and linen tablecloths, was all but empty. A pair of business types were having a late breakfast of bacon and eggs, and a young lovey-dovey couple just passing through were having an early lunch of oyster stew, a specialty of the Trinidad House Hotel.

Willa was seated by the window, a vision in a mote-floating shaft of soft sunlight, looking not at all the tomboy or cowgirl, but the lovely young woman she was. No plaid shirt or Levi’s today — she was in that navy-and-white calico dress that he liked so well on her. Nothing fancy, just a simple, feminine frock. That yellow hair was piled high with little curls decorating her smooth forehead.

Nothing of last night’s girl holding back tears and anger could be seen in today’s self-composed young woman. She even smiled when she saw him enter the dining room. He left his hat on a hook near the entry and joined her.

“Thank you, Willa,” he said.

“For...?”

“For meeting me. For seeing me off. I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

Her smile was a pursed thing, like a kiss she was about to throw. “Neither was I. But I felt I should apologize for my behavior last night.”

“Nothing to apologize about.”

She shook her head and all that glorious hair moved a little. “You never lied to me. You made it clear you would be leaving one day. One day soon. I had no right to think otherwise.”

“Willa, this frontier life... it’s going to be over one of these days. And I want something else. I haven’t asked you to come with me because I knew you wouldn’t.”

Her eyebrows rose. “That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t it?”

“No. I know you’re going to stick by your father. As well you should. Long as he’s alive, and the Bar-O is chugging along, you need to be at his side. Perhaps some day, after he’s gone... perhaps you’ll decide running a ranch isn’t for you.”

Her eyebrows were back down, but the eyes themselves were half-lidded. “What else might I do with my life, Caleb?”

“You could join me in San Diego.”

“Why — is there another position open with the Pinkertons?”

She was teasing him, but in a way that said, behind her adult attitude, the angry child still lurked.

“There’s an opening for you, all right. As my wife.”

A tiny laugh. “You’re proposing marriage, minutes before boarding the stage out of town?”

He nodded. “I’m not offering you a ring. I’m not asking for a commitment. You are free to live your life.”

She flushed a little. “Well, that’s very generous of you, Caleb.”

He reached across the table and touched her hand. That she did not draw it away from his was a relief.

“Sweetheart,” he said, “if your feeling for me cools, if someone comes along who fits better into your life... is the right kind of man to run the Bar-O with you... I would never stand in your way.”

She laughed just a little. Her eyes were sad but not tearing. “You have a peculiar way of telling a girl you love her, Caleb York.”

“Well, I do, Willa. But the time has to be right. And the situation has to suit us both. Or we’ll just be another one of these unhappy couples, hitched to each other like mules to a buckboard.”

“No one sweet-talks like you, Caleb.”

He shook his head. “I just can’t ask you to wait for me. I won’t be coming back to Trinidad.”

“Not even to visit?”

“Well... maybe then. And maybe you could take a trip to San Diego on occasion. Very beautiful. Lots of ocean. Will you write me, Willa?”

“Will you write me?”

“Sure. With my well-known line of sweet talk.”

They were smiling at each other now.

So they ordered lunch, both having the oyster stew — amazing what the cook back there could do with tins of those things — and Willa took tea, York coffee. They chatted, mostly about Willa’s plans for the ranch. The buyers had paid well for the herd last spring and things were looking up.

“I’m a bit surprised,” she said, “that you’re leaving before Zachary Gauge gets to town.”

Zachary was Harry Gauge’s cousin, from somewhere back East, and word around Trinidad was that he’d inherited the late sheriff’s property. Much speculation had been bandied about as to the cousin’s intentions, since the sheriff had bought over half-a-dozen spreads in his efforts to secure the area’s cattle trade, and had owned half-interests in many of the town businesses.

York said, “I thought it best he and I not meet.”

“Because you’re the man who killed his cousin? Maybe he’ll shake your hand — you’re also the man who made him rich.”

“Not so rich,” York said.

The meal was done, dishes cleared, and they were on their respective second cups of tea and coffee.

“But he owns all of those spreads,” Willa said. “That Harry Gauge made a powerful big landgrab, after all.”

“Yeah, but the new owner will be cattle poor. The beeves were all destroyed, remember, because of the pox. And the business owners have hired a lawyer from Albuquerque to represent them in getting back control of their shops.”

“Could they do that?”

York sipped coffee, nodded. “Our late, unlamented sheriff was running an extortion scheme. The shopkeepers of Trinidad were coerced into partnerships and then bullied into repaying ‘loans’ for the money Harry Gauge put up. They have a good case.”

Willa sipped her tea, shrugged. “Well, any way you look at it, Zachary Gauge is going to own a lot of land. Control more of the range than the Bar-O and the remaining smaller spreads put together.”

“Let’s hope Zachary is a better man than his cousin.”

She sat forward. Nothing but earnestness colored her voice now. “Don’t you think you should stay, and find out? Wouldn’t it depress you terribly to learn everything you and I and Papa and everyone went through, last year, was for naught?”

He smiled. “Darn good argument, Willa. You’ll know where to find me if things get out of hand.”

She smiled back. “I’ll know where to find you. And you’ll know where to find me.”

The stage would be rolling in soon. He asked her to walk him out and she did, slipping her arm in his. He grabbed his hat off the hook and put it on. Just outside the hotel, on the boardwalk, with no one around, she took his hands in hers and looked up at him with a heartbreaking smile. There, in the middle of town, they were all alone.

“You do know, Caleb, that you could have... been with me, if you wanted. You know I feel that deeply about you. About this. About us.”

He gave her a gentle smile. “Well, we did get a little frisky at times.”

She blushed. But she said, “You could have had me, Caleb. You still could. You still can.”

He touched her smooth cheek. “That can wait for our wedding night.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“It does. And, anyway—”

The sharp report of a handgun, only slightly muffled, stopped him, from across the street.

First Bank of Trinidad.

He took her in his arms, but not to kiss her, rather to spirit her inside where he said, “Get down. On the floor, now!”

She did. She’d been around gunfire before.

Another muffled gunshot. Yelling.

He flew to the check-in desk and the clerk was gone. Getting back around behind it, he found the little chinless buzzard cowering. But the carpetbag was right there, and York got into it, and yanked the Colt from its holster and ran out.

He hurtled the boardwalk railing and landed solid on the sand, 44 in hand, angled slightly up. Directly across the way, the three-story brick bank building sat imposingly on the corner. Out front at the hitching rail waited three black mustangs, looking calm as a millpond, unruffled by the sound of gunfire.

Not a good sign.

He’d barely landed when the first man blew out of the bank, running for his tethered horse; he wore jeans, a work shirt, the V of a red-and-black bandana kerchief covering his face from mid-nose down. On his heels came a second man, similarly garbed with a dark blue mask covering his lower face, dashing for his horse as well. The third man, also in work shirt, jeans, bandana kerchief mask (blue and white), came charging out, a six-gun in one hand and saddlebags stuffed with bank bags slung over his other arm.

The first one out never made it to his horse. York’s .44 took the top of his head off, which flew away with the dead man’s hat still on it. The robber fell near his horse, the animal so well-trained, so used to guns blazing, that a yawnlike whinny was its only reaction.

The second man got to his horse and on it and the animal was just about to gallop when its burden lessened, as two blasts from York’s .44 caught him in the back, and he let go of the reins and fell off the saddle on the bank side of the street, but got dragged a ways before the horse, getting up a good head of steam now, broke free.

The last man, the saddlebags-turned-moneybags slung in front of his saddle’s duck horn, was mounted already, York too busy killing his confederates to stop him from taking off. And while that shooting was going on, York was blocked from the third man by the two he was busy sending to hell.

Now the surviving robber was heading toward the livery, the horse already working some speed up.

That was when Sheriff Ben Wade barreled out of his office and down the steps to plant himself in the street in front of the oncoming man on horseback, the lawman taking aim with his Peacemaker. The rider swung around him but, as he did, fired once at the sheriff, with the ease of a marksman knocking a tin can off a fence post.

Then the rider was gone, cutting to the left, past the livery, where Tulley had come out with a shotgun in his hands but too late to do anything, hoofbeats receding.

The sheriff was just standing there, like he was thinking about what just happened, trying to make sense of it, weaving just a little. Then he went down all at once, like a house of twigs a child was building.

York went to the first one he’d shot, glanced down at the dead man, who was on his back with a soup of brains and blood emptied out of his ragged skull top, and kicked the weapon from limp fingers. He jogged to the other rider, the one the horse had dragged some, on his back with arms and legs going strange directions, and found the man at least as dead as his compadre, his six-gun lost in the shuffle.

Then York sprinted to Ben Wade, though he knew there was no hurry. The heavyset older man had wound up on his side, like a man sleeping who finally found a comfortable position, hat under him like an insufficient pillow. Some red had leaked from the hole in his chest across his vest and shirt and was soaking the sand, but no blood was flowing now. Dead men don’t bleed.

Caleb York, the black he wore making him an instant mourner, knelt over the man he’d brought to town, to take his place, and he said a prayer for him. But at the end of it he didn’t say, “Amen.”

He said, “Goddamn.”

God damn those who did this.

Townspeople were moving gingerly into the street, but Willa was moving quickly past the dead thieves, the bank president, and a clerk emerging with guns in hand — too little, too late — and over to York, who still knelt at his dead friend’s side. She crouched near the man she loved, put a hand on his shoulder.

“Caleb, are you all right?”

“No.”

“Lord! Were you hit?”

“No. But I’m not all right. I won’t be till I bring in Ben Wade’s killer.”

York unpinned the badge from Wade’s chest. Ben had said York would have to tear it off, if he wanted to take it back. But that wasn’t necessary.

He stood, and Willa rose with him.

She asked, “Does that mean... you’re staying?”

“For as long as it takes, I am.”

She pinned the badge on him.