The Last Days of Wolf Garnett

CHAPTER FIVE

Gault took some practice steps outside the shed, and Esther Garnett appeared at her kitchen door. "Seems to me like you're on the mend, Mr. Gault."

"Thanks to you, Miss Garnett," Gault said. Colly Fay appeared from a deep arroyo in the back of the house carrying a shovel.

Esther only gave Colly a casual glance. She said, "Pretty soon you'll be wantin' to leave us, I expect."

"I was thinkin'," Gault said, "that I've caused you about enough trouble. I'm much obliged for all you've done, but I'm able to ride now, any time. If Colly could help me get the buckskin saddled…"

In the back of Gault's memory lingered the shadowy figure of Wirt Sewell, and a puzzled expression showed in his face. Esther Garnett saw it immediately. "Is somethin' wrong, Mr. Gault?"

He couldn't bring himself to mention the mysterious express agent. He knew that Sewell had been there in the shed with him, and he knew that they had talked—he also knew that he could prove none of it.

"Nothin's wrong," he said, managing a small smile. "It was just a dream I had last night."

Those blue eyes looked at him steadily. "What kind of dream?"

"A storm. Thunder and lightnin', that kind of thing."

"There wasn't no storm last night," she told him soberly. "There was stars all over the sky. I was tellin' Colly."

"Like I say, it was just a dream." But what had happened to Wirt Sewell? He hadn't been a dream.

Gault returned to the shed, and within a few minutes Colly Fay was standing in the doorway. "Miss Esther says you're pullin' out."

"If you'll help me get the buckskin saddled."

"Which way will you be headin'?"

No sense starting a fight, Gault told himself. "Don't worry, Colly, I won't be headin' back to New Boston."

Colly brought up the saddled buckskin, then he helped Gault roll his bed and tie it on behind the cantle. "Deputy Finley said I'd get my Winchester back when I was well enough to ride out of here."

The posseman grinned. "Whatever the deputy says." He brought Gault his rifle. The firing pin had been replaced, but the magazine was empty. Gault knew without looking that the spare box of cartridges that he always carried would not be in the saddle pocket. He shoved the empty rifle into the boot.

Gault grasped the saddle horn and laboriously mounted the buckskin. The effort left him gasping. He leaned forward on the saddle horn, waiting for the pain to subside.

Colly was looking up at him, grinning widely. "You don't look too pert to me, Gault. A man in your shape, the best thing he can do is to stay out of trouble." Maybe Colly wasn't as simple as he appeared.

As Gault was pushing himself erect, Esther Garnett came out of the house carrying a grub sack. "It ain't much," she said apologetically. "Cold biscuits and dry salt meat. But maybe it'll last you till you get to your place in the Territory."

It seemed to Gault that no one ever missed an opportunity to suggest that he should make straight for Indian Territory and away from Texas. Wirt Sewell was the only one who hadn't offered some kind of argument in favor of his leaving Standard County as soon as possible—and Sewell hadn't been heard from since. "I'm much obliged for everything you've done, Miss Garnett," Gault said politely. "I'm sorry if I've put you out."

"You haven't put me out, Mr. Gault," she said with a placid smile.

The exchange was stilted and rang with false good humor. With a courteous little nod, Gault reined the buckskin away from the shed and started at an easy walk across the farmyard, heading north. He looked back once and Esther and the big posseman were deep in serious conversation. Gault rode on toward the river.

Shortly before sundown the indignant bellowing of a range cow caught Gault's attention. He reined to a knoll to see where the sound was coming from. The soft green valley of the Little Wichita was spread out in front of him, and in the center of that green carpet a man was kneeling beside a downed steer. A well-trained cow pony was standing patiently nearby.

Gault hesitated before moving in closer. If the stranger was a rustler, or an ambitious cowhand adding to his own stock, it would be smart to ride around him and pretend that he had seen nothing. But there was no branding fire that Gault could see. On impulse, he nudged the buckskin into the valley.

The man looked up at Gault. "Howdy." Then he went back to what he was doing. Beside him on the ground was an opened barlow knife, a syrup bucket half full of axle grease "dope," and a rag dauber. "Worms," the cowhand said without looking around. Meticulously, he cleaned a large sore on the steer's shoulder, cut away the proud flesh and coated the area with the black worm medicine. Finally he untied the animal and the steer loped across the valley, still bawling. The cowhand got to his feet and looked again at Gault. "You ain't from Colton, are you?"

Gault shook his head. "No."

"Colton's the straw boss. Manages the outfit for Mr. Cooper that lives in Kansas City. Hell of a way to run a cow outfit, if you was to ask me. From way off in Kansas." He put the lid on his bucket of "dope" and wrapped his dauber in a piece of tarpaulin.

"You ridin' line for Colton?" Gault asked.

The hand nodded. "South bank of the Red. Supposed to keep Cooper cattle from crossin' over and windin' up on Comanche cookin' fires. But I can't do it all myself." His tone turned to patient disgust. "Colton promised two days ago he was goin' to send me some help. You didn't see anybody along the way, have you?"

"No."

The cowhand scratched his unshaven jaw and cursed half-heartedly. "Most likely they forgot all about me." He gazed off to the south and something seemed to occur to him. "By the way," he said abruptly, "did you come by the Garnett place?"

Gault was surprised. "What makes you ask?"

"Most menfolks hereabouts wouldn't pass up a chance to see Miss Esther, if they was passin' anywheres near the place. You know Miss Esther, don't you?"

"We met," Gault said cautiously.

The cowhand grinned. "Pert as a spotted pup, ain't she? Be a powerful lucky man that gets her."

"In spite of her brother?"

The cowman waved off the notion that even an outlaw like Wolf in the family could tarnish the image of Esther Garnett. "Anyhow," he added, "Wolf's dead."

"So they say."

The cowhand wiped his hands on the seat of his worn California pants and said, "Name's Elbert Yorty."

"Frank Gault," Gault said, and vaguely embarrassed, they shook hands. Being plainsmen, they didn't ordinarily go in for handshaking, but sometimes a man, after a few weeks of talking to cows, got carried away.

"Got a piece of venison hangin' back at my line shack," Yorty said by way of invitation. "Unless you got somethin' better for supper."

Gault thought of Esther Garnett's hard biscuits and salt meat, and said gratefully, "I haven't."

On a distant knoll, directly behind Yorty, a familiar figure appeared on horseback and sat for a moment gazing down at them. Yorty didn't see him, and Gault didn't see any reason to mention it.

Yorty's line shack was a crude half-dugout affair nestled in the sprawling bottomland next to the Red. In Gault's honor, the cowhand carved a whole tenderloin out of the dressed venison and cooked it on a spit over a greenwood fire. "There's a monkey stove in the shack," Yorty explained, "but I never quite got the hang of cooking on it."

They ate with relish, hunkering around the fire as the cool spring night settled around them. A line rider lonesome for company, Yorty celebrated this occasion by opening a treasured can of tomatoes, and even produced some condensed milk for the coffee. In the time honored tradition of the frontier, they ate in silence, giving their entire attention to the meal at hand. Then they moved back a little from the fire and lit their smokes and sipped their scalding, faintly rancid coffee.

Gault cocked his head, listening for a moment with all his attention. If Colly was anywhere nearby he wasn't letting that fact be known. Gault thought with grim amusement that Colly must be getting pretty tired of cold grub and fireless nights.

"One lobo," Elbert Yorty was saying, "don't make a wolf pack. The Garnetts was a first-class family before Wolf started givin' it a bad name. Did you know his folks?"

"No. Esther Garnett told me her parents died four years ago."

"About that." Yorty nodded to himself. "I've been workin' cattle in Standard County longer'n I like to think about— and back in them days the Garnetts was as good as anybody in these parts. Even if they did start out as squatter farmers." This, from a cowman, was praise of the highest kind. "Even after Wolf started to go bad, nobody blamed it on the rest of the family. Course," he added after a moment's thought, "they was always thick as molasses."

"Who was?"

"The Garnetts. Everybody said that Miss Esther and Wolf was closer than most brothers and sisters. And the old folks, they never said anything against Wolf, even after he'd gone bad. But then, I guess nobody expected the Garnetts to say anything out loud against their own…"

Gault looked at his host thoughtfully. It almost seemed that Yorty was trying to tell him something without actually putting it in so many words. He said offhandedly, "Happened I was in New Boston the day of the funeral. Miss Esther didn't come."

"Pretty broke up, I guess," Yorty said, helping himself to more coffee.

"I guess." After several weeks of riding line by himself, it was clear that the cowhand was eager for human company. Still, it occurred to Gault that Yorty had talked a good deal without saying much of anything. Yorty had made no secret of his admiration for Esther Garnett, but he was no wet-nosed pup to dance a fandango—or hoe an acre of corn—just because a pretty woman smiled at him. Yorty was well into his fifties. An old man, considering the business he was in.

Gault sat for a moment, lost in his own dark memories.

Suddenly he asked, "Was you well acquainted with Wolf Garnett when he was livin' in these parts?"

"Well acquainted?" Yorty rubbed his bristling chin. "I wouldn't say that. I knowed him, like most folks did."

"Tell me about him." Gault was surprised at his own question. Until this moment his only thought had been to find Wolf Garnett and kill him.

Yorty methodically built and lit another smoke. "Not a whole lot to tell. Wolf was a bad apple from the very beginnin'. In trouble of some kind nearly all the time. Hot temper. Fist fights. A cuttin' scrape or two. But folks in Standard County figgered he was just young and a little wild. Course, it begin to look some different when we got the reports from Kansas, when he killed his first man."

"Did he ever come back to his homeplace after that?"

"Folks said he did, but I never seen him."

"Can you tell me somethin' about the county sheriff, Olsen? And the young deputy that works for him?"

Elbert Yorty finished his smoke in silence. He snapped the dead butt into the fire and said, "Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to get somebody to talk to. But it does seem like you ask some queer questions, Gault."

Gault realized that he had been pushing too hard; it was a bad habit of his. "I've got an interest in Wolf Garnett," he said slowly.

"What kind of interest?"

"Not quite a year ago he killed my wife."

Gault had not meant to put it so bluntly and coldly. But there it was, where even the dullest kind of intelligence could understand it. Now he would see just where Yorty stood.

The cowhand rocked back on his heels like an Indian and stared at him for several minutes. "I'm sorry about your wife. But I can't help you about Wolf; I already told you ever'thing I know."

"What about the sheriff?"

The cowhand spread his hands. "Nothin' there to tell. He's a good hand far's I know, and he's been on the job a long time. As for Dub Finley, he's just a young pup that likes pony hide vests and nickel-plated badges, but he'll grow out of it in time."

"Is he in love with Esther Garnett?"

The oldtimer blinked his surprise. "Maybe." Then he stretched his arms and yawned extravagantly. "It's been a long day. I think I'll throw my bed."

"Just one more thing. Deputy Finley's got two possemen riding with him. Colly Fay and Shorty Pike. Can you tell me about them?"

"Like I say," Yorty said with a humorless smile, "it's been a long day." He got to his feet and walked off toward the shack.

Gault sat for some moments in silence. Finally he got his own bed and threw it beside the fire, and for a long while he lay gazing up at the gunsteel sky while, in his mind, a driverless stagecoach went off a mountain road.

Yorty was up before first light, but Gault already had the fire built and coffee water in the pot. The two men ate what was left of the venison tenderloin while the coffee boiled.

"Gault," the cowhand said in an idle tone, "I meant what I said last night, about your wife. I'm sorry. If I could help you I would, but…"

"But," Gault continued, "you've got your own reasons for keeping quiet. And besides, Wolf Garnett is dead."

"Well," Yorty conceded, "there's that, too. He is dead now. Is the rest of it so important?"

"To me it is."

The cowhand sighed. "It don't make any sense, but I guess I can understand it. But there's another reason I didn't say anything last night. Did you know we was being watched?"

"You saw him?" Gault asked in surprise.

"Heard him. Kind of scoochin' up the draw in back of the shack. Wouldn't no wild critter come up on a firelight that way. It had to be a man."

Gault smiled wearily. "One of the deputy's pals makin' sure I behave myself and leave Finley and Olsen to run the county the way they want to run it."

"I don't know about that," Yorty said, obviously puzzled. "But like I said, I guess I can understand the way you feel. About losin' your wife. So, if you feel like you just got to find out all about Wolf Garnett, there's two men you ought to talk to. First one is Harry Wompler, that used to be Olsen's deputy. Him and Esther Garnett was keepin' company till about a year ago. Some folks figgered they was aimin' to get hitched, but nothin' ever come of it."

"What happened?"

Yorty smiled crookedly. "Folks claim that Miss Esther measures her men friends against her brother and can't find one that comes up to the mark." He started to say something else, then changed his mind and gazed into the distance.

"This Wompler that used to be Olsen's deputy. How did he come to lose his job?"

Yorty's eyes became remote. "I'd rather leave that up to Wompler hisself."

"Two men, you said. Who's the other one?"

"Stock detective for the Standard County Cattlemen's Association. Name of Del Torgason."

"What makes you think Torgason would know anything about Wolf Garnett."

"It's a stock detective's business to know things. Most likely you'll find him in the Association office in New Boston."

"You still don't want to tell me how Wompler lost his badge?"

The old cowhand rubbed his jaw and considered. "Well, there was a story about Wompler gettin' hisself mixed up with a gang of rustlers. I never got all the particulars. And I guess nobody else did."

"Was Wompler arrested?"

Yorty looked as if this question had occurred to him before. "No, the sheriff just hauled him off the job and fired him."

"Is he still in New Boston?"

"Last I heard." Yorty built himself another smoke and began kicking out the fire. "You're welcome to stay around the shack, Gault, but I've got to get back on the job." He lit his smoke and asked with studied unconcern, "You aimin' to go back to New Boston and talk to Torgason and Wompler?"

"Not now. Some of the sheriff's pals are expectin' me to head back to the Territory. I wouldn't want to disappoint them."

The Red was swollen with spring rains. Gault rode west, along the south bank of the river, looking for a crossing. In places the reddish water sprawled over a quarter of a mile of sandy bottomland. In the main channel, where the water was deepest, fallen cottonwoods bumped from sandbar to sandbar as they made their tortuous way downstream.

He selected a place where he knew a solid bottom of limestone existed. It was not his personal discovery, it had been discovered by the Comanches and Kiowas and Southern Cheyennes many years ago, when they were still raiding through Texas into the heart of Chihuahua.

Gault drew his Winchester from the saddle boot and put the nervous buckskin into the river. Ripples of fear passed along the animal's withers as the cold water washed his belly. The water crept higher along the stirrup leathers, but the bottom remained firm as far as mid channel. Gault took a deep breath and slid out of the saddle. The buckskin plunged into the deep water and thrashed frantically.

Gault clung to the saddle horn and held his Winchester in the air. The Winchester with the new firing pin and no ammunition. His boots filled with icy water. It lapped at his chest and soaked the elaborate bandages that Esther Garnett had applied with so much care. Then the buckskin found solid bottom again, and Gault climbed back into the saddle.

They had reached the north bank. He was now in Indian Territory—possibly in the Chickasaw Nation, but most likely in the southeast corner of the Comanche-Kiowa grasslands known to cowmen as the Big Pasture.

Gault put the buckskin up the sandy slope and stopped for a few minutes to empty his boots and squeeze some water from his windbreaker. His bedroll had been soaked in the crossing, and so had his warbag, but there was no help for that now. Sitting on a rock, he pulled on his boots and studied the south bank.

There was no sign of Colly.

Gault mounted and rode on to the north, over a string of sandhills. When he was on the far side of the hills he dismounted again and crawled up to the brush-strewn ridge and studied the south bank some more.

Apparently Colly had decided that Gault was going to be reasonable, return to his own business and put Standard County out of his thoughts.

Gault spent the rest of the morning on the north bank of the Red, watching for the big posseman while slowly drying out in the gentle sun. At last he decided that enough time had passed and that Colly had surely started back to the Garnett farm. He put the buckskin into the river again.

The buckskin hated that swift cold water even more than Gault did. The animal's eyes rolled in fear as it scrambled for solid bottom. His small ears lay back on his head. Gault leaned forward in the saddle and stroked the quivering withers. That was when Colly Fay stepped out of a cedar thicket and said angrily, "Shorty said you'd try to slick me! And you did!"

Gault, with a sudden ache in his gut, stared at the big posseman and continued in his efforts to gentle the buckskin. Colly had his rifle aimed at Gault's chest. It was always a bad sign when a man took up his rifle instead of his revolver—the killer who meant business did not waste his time with hand guns.

Colly walked steadily toward Gault on the nervous buckskin. Gault took a deep breath and prepared to speak to the posseman in a reasonable tone. But he knew instinctively that Colly could not be reached with reason. Dull-witted men could endure almost any humiliation except the thought that they had been tricked—and this was the thought that Colly had locked into his own dull mind.

Yet, Gault heard himself saying quietly, "Colly, listen to me…"

But Colly wasn't listening to anyone. Gault was already as good as dead, as far as the posseman was concerned. He smiled his loose smile and came a few steps closer. Gault sat like stone. The temptation to grab for his Winchester was almost irresistible—but the rifle was useless and Colly knew it.

Then, because there seemed nothing else to do, Gault kicked his spurs into the buckskin's ribs.

The nervous animal lunged forward as if released by a spring. The slow-witted Colly stared blankly. Gault caught a glimpse of the posseman's face as the buckskin reared and crashed down on him. He was still smiling that slack smile; in his slow-moving mind he was seeing Frank Gault laid out for burying. It was probably the last thought he had, in that instant before he died.

After it was over Gault imagined that he had heard the sound of iron-shod hoofs slashing down on Colly's skull, but reason told him it was highly unlikely. It had happened too fast. The trembling buckskin had surged forward like a bullet, all but unseating Gault in the process.

There Colly had fallen beneath the buckskin's hoofs, his shabby hat crushed down over his bloody face. Gault did not have to look a second time to know that he was dead. He spurred the animal away from the scene. For several seconds he sat bent over the saddle horn, his insides strangely cold, his stomach pushing into his throat.

For almost a year Gault's thoughts had been concerned exclusively with the subject of death. In his dreams, waking and sleeping, he had killed Wolf Garnett a thousand times. But it had never been like this, with the crunch of bone and rush of blood. In his mind it had always been swift and clean and right.

He kneed the buckskin into a gully where the corpse could not be seen nor the blood smelled, and then he slowly dismounted and tied up in a flowering redbud. He knew that he would have to go back and do something about the body. But at the moment he didn't want to think about it.

So he stayed with the buckskin, gentling the animal until it stood calmly. Only then did he make himself return to that sandy flat where the body lay. "I didn't aim to kill you, Colly," he heard himself saying aloud. "Even though," the voice continued, "you sure as hell was aimin' to kill me."

He still wasn't sure what ought to be done about the body. Bury it? He had nothing to dig with. Take it with him to New Boston? He smiled grimly at the thought of bringing in one of Olsen's possemen, like a dog with a bone, and laying it at the big lawman's feet.

He postponed the decision by tramping downstream to where Colly had staked his own animal. He pulled the stake pin and gentled the posseman's black gelding. Almost as an afterthought, and without much hope, he began searching the saddle pockets for ammunition to fit his Winchester.

He gave a little grunt of surprise as he pulled out a full box of .30 caliber shells. Maybe his luck was changing. He dug deeper in the saddle pocket and lifted out a carefully wrapped parcel, a package several times the size of the shell box, wrapped with considerable care in a flannel shirt and an oilskin covering. But in spite of the care that had gone into the wrapping, one end had come open. As Gault took the parcel in his hands two gold double-eagles spilled out and fell to the ground. Colly Fay was still full of surprises.

Gault hunkered down beside the gelding and carefully opened the package. For a long while he remained in that position, staring down at the contents. A yellow gold watch, and a heavy chain of the same metal. A silver penknife. Several loose coins, including four more double-eagles. A roll of greenbacks wrapped in its own protective oilskin cover. Gault unwrapped it and counted them—they came to three hundred and ninety dollars.

There was also a small buckskin pouch which Gault opened and emptied onto the oilskin. One by one, he ticked off the small items in his mind. A pair of earrings set with small stones that might have been diamonds. A string of milky white beads that could have been pearls. And at the bottom of the buckskin pouch there was a plain rose gold wedding band. It was the ring that Gault had given to Martha when they were married.

Gault could not remember how long he crouched there, holding that small ring in his hand, trying to feel something of his lost wife in the rose-colored metal. But Martha was a year dead almost. There was nothing of her in the ring.

Still he crouched there, staring out at the sprawling sandy banks of the Red. He remained so still that a squirrel darted out of a liveoak tree and scurried in front of him without seeing him. It was almost as if he had been captured there in a block of invisible ice, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, aware of nothing but that small gold ring.

The black gelding tugged at its stakerope. Gault turned and looked at the animal as if he were seeing it for the first time. Slowly, he dropped the ring into his shirt pocket. Then he rewrapped the small parcel with the same great care that Colly had taken in wrapping it for the first time.

Finally he led the black to the gully where the buckskin was waiting. Then he walked back to where the dead man lay sprawled in the sand.

"Time to get up, Colly. We're going to New Boston."