The Last Days of Wolf Garnett

CHAPTER THREE

It was a pleasant spring day in North Texas. The rolling prairie was sparkling green, the sky a dazzling blue. Cattle, fat and sleek, lazed in the new grass. Along the streams budding cottonwoods and oaks were coming into leaf. The sun was warm, the air so clean that it tasted faintly of flint and steel. All in all, it was a near perfect day for travelers.

Frank Gault did not enjoy it. He was not even aware of the calm beauty that surrounded him.

For the past hour he had suspected that he was being followed; within the past few minutes he had become certain of it. There were two of them at least, maybe three. They lay far back on his backtrail, popping up from behind ridges and knolls, moving when Gault moved, stopping when he stopped. Usually there was only one of them in sight at a time, and never more than two.

Near midafternoon Gault dismounted at a small stream and let the buckskin drink and graze for several minutes. Far to the south, appearing as little more than a speck on the horizon, one of the riders topped a rise and stopped. Could it be the sheriff? Gault didn't think so. Even at that distance, Gault was sure that he would recognize Grady Olsen's slope-shouldered figure if he were to see it.

The deputy, maybe? Gault had met the deputy only once, and the young lawman had not greatly impressed him. It was impossible to tell at that distance.

Whoever they were, they seemed to be playing a waiting game. Waiting and watching. Gault would have given a great deal to know why.

He rebalanced and tied the bulky bedroll behind the saddle and once again pointed the buckskin toward the northwest. The horsebacker on the far horizon moved casually across the green prairie and disappeared in a stand of blackjack. In a few minutes one of the other riders appeared on a wooded knoll, maybe a mile to the east of the first one.

Gault began to experience an ill-defined ache in his gut. At first it occurred to him that the surly proprietor of the New Boston Ritz had poisoned him. Then he recognized it for what it was—a subtle but steadily growing fear. It was not an unfamiliar experience—all cattlemen knew it well. A horse going off a cut bank on a dark night. The suck of quicksand. Stumbling in front of a stampede.

But this was different. It was a quiet but growing thing. The kind of sensation that went with the knowledge that he was unarmed and helpless in a hostile country.

Late that afternoon Gault reached the Little Wichita and prepared to make camp in a grove of rattling cottonwoods. The distant horsebackers were not to be seen, but he had no doubt that they were there. Waiting and watching.

The prairie sun took a long time dying. Gault staked the buckskin in new grass and built his fire. He did not bother to make it small or smokeless—the watchers would see it, however small he made it. Methodically, he inspected the meager camp gear that the hostler had thrown in with the buckskin. A small skillet, a granite coffeepot, a spoon, all wrapped in a faded tarpaulin and a dirty patchwork quilt. In his own warbag he had a small parcel of cornmeal, a piece of dry salt meat and some crushed coffee beans.

He cut off a slab of salt meat and put it in the skillet to cook. He dipped some water into the coffeepot, added the crushed beans and set it beside the skillet. From far upstream he heard the faint rustle of brush. It might have been a deer. Or a wild turkey settling on a cottonwood branch for the night. But he didn't think so.

Gault smiled thinly to himself as the smell of cooking meat spread on the still air. He wondered if the watchers would dare to build fires, or if they would lay back cautiously and make do with cold trail fare that night.

The shadows along the river became longer and blacker. Night, with its hundreds of fluttering and scurrying sounds, came to the Little Wichita. The darkness of springtime was chill and damp, but no fires appeared on the prairie. It was small satisfaction knowing that his watchers were hungry and cold—but it was better than no satisfaction at all.

Gault stirred cornmeal and water into the meat grease and cooked the panbread over glowing embers. He ate in silence, without relish or satisfaction, and then he washed the skillet with sand and water and put it away.

They must know I'm unarmed, he reasoned to himself. If they wanted to finish me off they could have done it any time. Still, they're not going to all this trouble on a mere whim.

They were waiting to see what his next move would be. Now that he had reached the Little Wichita, would he cross the stream and head due north toward the Nations, or would he bear to the east and scout the river valley, looking for the Garnett farm?

If he made for the Nations, that would indicate that he had convinced himself that the body in the grave was actually that of Wolf Garnett and that any further investigation was useless. In which case, Gault speculated, the riders would trail him as far as the Red to satisfy themselves that he was actually making for the Nations. Then they would go back to wherever it was they came from.

On the other hand, if he struck up the valley of the Little Wichita looking for Wolf Garnett's homeplace, the watchers would likely regard it as a suspicious move.

And then what? The watchers—or someone—had managed to disarm him. Would they go as far as killing him? It didn't seem reasonable—but he was learning that the world wasn't necessarily a reasonable place. The coldblooded act of whipping a stage team off a mountain road hadn't been reasonable. But it had happened.

When the fire had burned down Gault threw his bed near a gnarled elm. He lay quietly, gazing blindly through the twisted branches. Was it possible that the men who were following him had been with Wolf Garnett that day?

For the thousandth time he saw the frightened horses racing off into thin air, and the coach turning slowly, end over end, before crashing on the rocks below.

He sat up suddenly in a cold sweat. I've got to stop this, he thought grimly. Pretty soon I'll be keening like a Comanche squaw and slashing my arms with knives. He dug into his windbreaker for makings and built a smoke. The sulphur match flared like a muzzle flash when he lit the cigarette.

He looked back at the dark trees along the river. Not since sundown had there been any sign of the men who were watching him. But they were there. He had no doubt of that. How long do you aim to sit out there, he thought bleakly, without hot grub, without even a smoke?

Gault snapped his own smoke toward the dying embers. To hell with you, he told them silently. Sooner or later I'll find out who you are. But for right now, to hell with you. He closed his eyes and made a desert of his mind. An April dew settled on his bed with clammy coldness, but he ignored it. He drifted into a state of dreamlessness that passed as sleep. The watchers, wherever they were, remained silent and invisible.

The morning was chill and damp and heady with the smell of green things growing. Gault stirred himself before first light and rebuilt the fire and put coffee on to boil. He saw to the buckskin and then scouted the upper banks for tracks. But the watchers of the night had kept their distance.

From somewhere upstream a wild bird beat the air with its wings. The watchers were moving in closer, and they were not being so quiet about it now. Gault gulped his gritty coffee and chewed on leftover panbread that he had cooked the night before.

He got the buckskin saddled, then rolled his bed and made it fast behind the cantle. He slid the Winchester into the saddle boot without bothering to check it, as he normally would. If his trackers were watching, maybe they would think that he hadn't yet discovered the ruined firing pin.

Gault climbed up to the saddle. All right, boys, he thought quietly, from here on out you better keep a close watch. Because I ain't right sure myself which way I'm going to take.

A short distance downstream he put the buckskin over a rock crossing that Comanches and Kiowas had probably used not many years before when they were raiding down from the Territory. Due north was the Big Pasture and the Nations, where Frank Gault was known and respected. Where there were men who would lend him money to get started again, if he were to ask for it.

But he did not head north. He bore east, making for the upper reaches of the Little Wichita. And behind him he could almost hear his trailers shrug resignedly and check the loading of their weapons.

Around midmorning Gault caught a glimpse of the lead rider. He was a short, blocky man with a blunt, pugnacious look about him. Expertly, he threaded a sturdy little claybank in and out through the stands of cottonwood and oak. They were moving in fast now, not overly concerned with whether or not Gault spotted them.

A few minutes later Gault raised the fields that he guessed belonged to the Garnetts. There were several acres of cotton in even rows, almost ready for its first thinning and chopping. Set farther back from the river there was a good-sized patch of early corn, young and tender green and languid looking on that mild spring morning. Closer to the house and sheds was what Gault knew to be a vegetable garden, although he couldn't tell at that distance what was planted there.

The house itself was a half sod, half timber affair, maybe three rooms. A big house, Gault thought immediately; an unusually prosperous looking spread for that particular part of Texas. The rare farm that Gault had chanced across in North Texas usually amounted to no more than a one-room soddy and maybe two or three acres of scratched red clay. The Garnett place included several permanent sheds and outbuildings, some work animals, a wagon, a scattering of chickens and probably a cow for milking. A very prosperous looking layout, Gault thought again with bitterness. Either the Garnetts were exceptionally industrious, or they had received considerable help.

A rider that Gault had not seen before appeared from a wild plum thicket near the water. He was a stolid, slack-jawed man in his middle years, with coarse features and the impersonal stare of simple-mindedness in his pale eyes. He rode toward Gault with an abstracted grin tugging at the corners of his mouth—but there was nothing simple-minded or unbusinesslike in the way he held a short saddle rifle pointed at Gault's chest.

"Set easy," the man said placidly. "We don't aim to hurt you. If you behave yourself and mind what we say."

Gault twisted in the saddle and saw the short man coming toward them from a thicket farther upstream. When he was close enough to be heard, the short man said, "My advice is do like Colly tells you. He may not look right bright, but there ain't many men hereabouts that can best him with a rifle."

Colly. The name struck a spark in Gault's mind. He remembered the two pals of Wolf Garnett's that the sheriff had mentioned. One had been Colly Fay. The other Shorty Pike. Two harmless drovers working a herd up the Western Trail to Dodge, the sheriff had said. Two ignorant farm boys who had fallen in with bad company for a while. But they had seen the error of their ways and turned back to the path of honesty and truth—according to Sheriff Grady Olsen. Gault wondered if Sheriff Olsen would be surprised if he could have seen his two farm boys now, both of them with snub-barreled rifles pointed at Gault's chest.

Gault did not look at the rifles. He did his best to act and talk as if they were not there at all. "You boys strayed pretty far from bedground, looks like. Sheriff Olsen seemed to figger you'd gone back to drivin' cattle, after you took it on yourselves to ride over to New Boston and identify Wolf Garnett's body."

Colly Fay continued to smile abstractedly. Shorty Pike shrugged his shoulders and casually slipped his saddle gun back in its boot. "We won't go into that now. Just say we changed our mind."

All right, Gault thought, let's see what kind of cards you're holding! He glanced toward the field of green corn and asked, "Is that the Garnett place?"

Shorty took a deep breath and made a quiet decision of his own. "That what you been lookin' for? The Garnett place?"

Gault made himself smile. "Just wonderin'. Curiosity, you might say."

The muzzle of Colly's rifle moved a fraction of an inch, as if hunting the exact center of Gault's chest. Shorty folded his hands on the saddle horn and looked at Gault and said nothing. Apparently the next move would come from another direction.

"Look," Gault said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, "I don't know why folks are so dead set against lettin' me talk to Wolf Garnett's sister. I don't aim to pester her or give her any more grief than she's already come in for. All I want is to talk to her about her brother."

"Why?"

"I want to satisfy myself that Wolf Garnett is dead."

Shorty glanced at his partner and smiled. He touched his forehead with his finger to suggest that Gault was more than a little loco. Colly Fay chuckled absently and nodded.

A third rider approached silently along Gault's backtrail. He swung down toward the river and came toward them through a grove of cottonwoods. Gault turned cautiously to look at him—and somehow he was not surprised when he saw that it was Standard County's only full-time deputy sheriff, Dub Finley.

Gault leaned forward on the saddle horn and said dryly, "I don't guess you boys rode all this way just to give me back my .45, did you?"

Finley shot a look at Shorty Pike, and the squarest little man said, "We never stopped him until we seen he was makin' straight for the farm."

The deputy frowned and his hairline pointed down the center of his forehead. "What are you after, Gault?"

What was he after? Gault had asked himself the question many times, and he still wasn't sure of the answer. Revenge? Satisfaction? Justice? He didn't know. He only knew that there was a wild thing inside that would not let him rest—and maybe, if he could be sure that Wolf Garnett was dead, the thing could be tamed and lived with. But all he said to the deputy was, "I want to ask Wolf's sister some questions."

"All the folks that count," the deputy said bluntly, "have already asked their questions. Representatives of the express company and the cattlemen's association, that had bounties on Wolf's head. County lawmen and U.S. marshals that had warrants for his arrest. Newspaper writers from all over. For almost three days Esther had questions throwed at her from ever' which way—almost more'n a woman could stand. It got her so upset she couldn't even come to New Boston for the funeral." Dub Finley wanted to be the cool, efficient and responsible lawman that he imagined himself to be, but he was by nature hotheaded and impulsive. In spite of himself, his voice was slowly rising up the scale of anger. "What I'm sayin', Gault, is she's had enough. She ain't goin' to be plagued with any more questions. Not while I'm deputy here."

"What does Sheriff Olsen say about it?"

Finley smiled unpleasantly. "Me and the sheriff see alike on this." Again he made an effort to rein himself in. "I'm sorry about what happened to your wife. But that was almost a year ago. And Wolf Garnett's dead. My advice is forget it, Gault."

Forget it. Pretend the sweaty nightmares weren't there. Pretend that Martha was still radiant and warm and that her murder had never happened. "Forgettin'," he said with a curious flatness, "ain't an easy thing to do."

"I guess," the young deputy said unfeelingly, "it's somethin' you'll have to learn." He brushed some trail dust from his pony hide vest. This reminded him how long he had been out trailing Gault, and how long it had been since he had had hot food or proper rest, and this realization whetted his pugnaciousness to a fine edge. "I don't aim to keep on tellin' you, Gault. This is the last time. Go on back to where you came from."

Somewhere in the back of Gault's mind the quiet voice of reasonableness said, "He's probably right. I'm not doing myself any good, carryin' on this way. It won't bring Martha back. And you can't go on hating a dead man all your life. If he is dead. And the experts claim he is. So it doesn't really make any difference whether or not you talk to Wolf Garnett's sister…"

But when he looked at the smug arrogance in the deputy's face, he said "Tell your gunhands to get out of my way. I aim to talk to Miss Garnett—unless you're willin' to go as far as to shoot me."

"I'll go as far as I need to," Dub Finley said, and Gault had no doubt that he meant it.

Even now the young deputy was quietly taking his measure. Gault could see it in those remote eyes. He was making up his mind whether he ought to kill him here and now, stopping all argument and saving himself a lot of trouble. Gault, in spite of the thing that drove him, was chilled at what he saw in Deputy Finley's eyes.

Colly Fay was gazing at Gault and grinning vacantly. Shorty Pike sat like a square stump, apparently waiting for some signal from Finley. Gault discovered that his mouth was suddenly dry. His tongue felt thick and furry. No one had bothered to remove his rifle from its saddle boot— they were confident that the weapon was useless and that he was helpless. The only problem of the moment seemed to be whether or not he was worth shooting.

A fine bead of sweat began to form on Gault's forehead. Somehow he had never expected things to go this far. But then, he reminded himself, a man used to living within the law is always surprised at the prospect of murder. It had surprised him once before.

He forced himself to sit quietly and tried not to stare at Colly Fay's saddle gun. Dub Finley looked at him with a cool little smile and shrugged his shoulders. The gesture said louder than words, "There's nothing for it, Gault. If I let you go, you'd only come back and cause trouble later. I might as well get it over with now."

Gault suddenly stared at an invisible point just beyond Colly Fay's shoulder. He stared with all the surprise and fascination that he could muster. Colly blinked, as Gault had hoped he would. The simple-minded rifleman scowled and half-turned in his saddle to see what it was behind him that was so completely fascinating. For an instant the muzzle of the rifle was pulled off line with Gault's chest. Gault struck at it savagely. The weapon fell from Colly's surprised hands, and Gault heard it thud quietly to the soft turf.

By that time Gault had jerked the startled buckskin around and was spurring toward the covering timber along the river. Even while he was doing it he was thinking, there's no use. Finley's already made up his mind and he will never let me get as far as the river.

He was right. Almost immediately a second rifle, this one belonging to Shorty Pike, spoke bitingly in the clean morning air. Gault felt the bee sting on his left side. Almost instantly the bee sting was a rapidly spreading numbness— and, in dizzying sequence, the numbness became a dazzling center of pain.

He thought angrily to himself: It's nothing. No more than a glancing hit at worse. Maybe a cracked rib. Nothing more than that.

But already he was falling. There was no more shooting. That was a bad sign, for it meant that Shorty himself must be convinced that he was done for. Gault grabbed for the saddle horn and missed. He continued to fall with nightmarish slowness. He remembered trying, without success, to shake his foot free of the stirrup. Then the ground loomed up and struck him with hammerlike force. The buckskin dragged him for another hundred yards before his foot came free—but Gault did not remember that.

After what seemed a very long time but could not have been more than a few minutes, Gault became aware of an almost endless expanse of startlingly blue sky. He lay on his back against a stone outcrop that had eventually stopped his rolling and tumbling. There was fire in his side and no air in his lungs. Fighting for breath, he tried to push himself erect. The toe of a dusty boot planted itself in his chest and pushed him back on the damp earth.

Deputy Dub Finley moved in to stand up against the shimmering backdrop of blue sky. From Gault's position, he looked as tall as a mountain. He had drawn his .45 and was holding it in his right hand, thoughtfully tapping the muzzle in the palm of his left hand while he gazed unblinkingly down at Gault.

As if from a great distance, Gault heard Shorty Pike say, "Somebody comin'."

Then the picture became confused. The sky turned dark. The figure of Deputy Finley loomed huge and tilted at a sickening angle. Gault closed his eyes in an effort to keep the sky from spinning. From a void he heard voices and echoes of voices. Some were angry and excited. Others cool and dangerous. Gault didn't open his eyes to see where the voices were coming from. At the moment it didn't seem to matter. In spite of his efforts, the world began to spin. Darkness came down on him like the lid of a coffin.