The Last Days of Wolf Garnett

CHAPTER SIX

It was early afternoon and the town was quiet when Gault entered it. Much quieter than it had been on the day of the funeral. Farmers were back working their crops. Stockmen were finishing up their spring branding. A slack day in a slack season. A town dozing beneath a gentle North Texas sun.

The hostler at the wagon yard was the first to see them. The little bandy-legged man came pushing a wheelbarrow of manure around the corner of the livery barn when he first saw Gault slouched wearily on the buckskin. Colly's black gelding plodded behind on a lead rope, with the dead posseman across the saddle.

The hostler, whose name was Abe Tricer, dropped the wheelbarrow and started running toward the center of town. Gault watched him without expression.

A curious storekeeper stepped out to the sidewalk to see what the running was about. He took one look at Gault and the burdened black and called to someone in the store. By the time Gault reached the general store where the sheriff had his office, there were several little clusters of men gathered on the sidewalk. They did not venture away from the storefronts but stood quietly, watching.

The sheriff and the little hostler appeared in the doorway of Olsen's office as Gault tied up in front of the store. The big lawman stepped out on the second-floor gallery and looked down at them with thunder in his face. He came down the stairway two steps at a time.

"What's goin' on here?" he snarled.

"Your posseman's dead. I brought him home," Gault said with a flatness of tone that caused the sheriff to blink. Then Olsen strode to the black, lifted the dead man's head and studied the dead face. "He's not my posseman."

"Your deputy's, then. It comes to the same thing."

The little hostler was fairly dancing with excitement. "I was the first one seen him, Sheriff. Come ridin' into town, just like he owned it. I recognized Colly's black geldin' right off. Recognized Colly too. Dead as a fencepost. I'd figgered you'd want to know about it right off."

"See if you can find Doc Doolie," Olsen said.

"What you want with the doc? Colly's done for. Don't take a doc to see that."

"Get him." This time there was no nonsense in Olsen's voice. "The rest of you…" He raked the gathering of loafers and storekeepers and a scattering of cowhands. "Get back to whatever you was doin'."

The hostler made for the upper end of the street in a rolling, lurching lope of the oldtime horseman. The rest of the crowd began backing up, reluctantly. They were curious to see what was going to develop, but none of them was anxious to tangle with Grady Olsen.

"You," the sheriff said harshly to Gault. "Give me a hand here."

Together they slipped the dead posseman off the saddle and laid him out beside Rucker's store. "Have you got a tarp or somethin' to cover him with?" the sheriff asked.

"No."

Glaring, Olsen returned to the gelding, unsaddled the animal and covered the dead man with the saddle blanket.

Then he pointed toward the stairway. "Up to my office. I'll talk to you there."

Inside the combination office-living quarters the sheriff slumped behind the oilcloth-covered table and motioned Gault to a chair. As Gault sat down somewhat cautiously, Olsen noticed for the first time that his face was pale and drawn beneath the stubble of trail beard. "You ailin' with somethin', Gault?"

"I'm fine," Gault said gratingly, "except for a busted rib, that comes from bein' shot by another one of your possemen. But I guess you got the whole story about that— when you rode out to the Garnett farm the night of the storm."

Gault watched him closely, wondering what his reaction would be. But Olsen only sat looking at him, his expression unchanging.

The lawman picked up a stub of a pencil and began turning it over and over in his blunt fingers. "My deputy told me about the shootin'," he said coldly. "Accident. Too bad it happened, but that's the way it goes when you mess with things that's none of your business. Anyway…" He made a motion with one hand, waving the subject away. "Anyway, that ain't the thing we're concerned with right now. You just brought me a dead man." His eyes narrowed. "Did you kill him?"

Gault breathed as deeply as he could against the tight bandaging. "Yes."

The sheriff blinked owlishly. "Why?"

The question was not as simple as it might first appear, and Gault was aware of it. "For one thing, he was about to kill me."

"Why would Colly Fay want to kill you?"

"He thought I wanted to trick him—and Colly couldn't stand the notion of somebody trying to make him look foolish. Anyway, he had orders to see that I returned to the Territory. When I came back across the river, that's when he tried to kill me."

The big sheriff shot him a bleak look. "I don't guess there was any witnesses that could testify it was an accident?"

"No. But there was this." Gault dug the flannel-wrapped parcel from the pocket of his windbreaker. He put it on the table. "When it was over, I went lookin' for Colly's horse. This is what I found in the saddle pocket."

Olsen looked at the package but did not touch it. Gault went on. "I'm not such a fool that I didn't realize it would be a dangerous proposition, me comin' back to New Boston with a dead posseman across his saddle. Common sense told me to roll him in a gully and pile rocks on top of him and put him out of my mind. That package he was carryin' made the difference. It's the reason I brought him back."

Olsen touched the parcel as he might have touched the clothing of a cholera patient. With thumb and forefinger he unfolded the flannel envelope. For some time he sat gazing at the gold watch and the string of milky pearls. His attention returned to the watch and he sat gazing bleakly at the curious inscription on the face cover.

At last the sheriff opened the buckskin pouch and emptied the contents on the table. He nudged the earrings with their glittering little diamonds over toward the pearls. The gold coins he counted and stacked neatly beside the greenbacks. When he had thoroughly memorized every detail of every article, he picked up the watch and studied it some more. "Is this all?"

"Except for this." Gault showed him the small band of gold. "I didn't think you'd mind if I kept it. It belonged to my wife."

The sheriff's mouth came open, but for the moment he did not speak. He slowly digested the meaning of the ring as a silent wall of hostility built up between them.

Doc Doolie appeared in the doorway, and the sheriff asked, "Did you look at Colly?"

"I looked at him. Been dead about a day, best I could tell. Skull busted in—looks like a horse kicked him." The little doc came into the room, took a kitchen chair and sat at the end of the sheriff's table. Gault stared at him so steadily and so hard that Doolie began to frown.

For a moment Gault had been startled to see the doc standing there. A small, slightly stooped figure. There was a shadow of such a figure still lodged in a back chamber of his mind. For the best part of three days he had been wondering about the man who had come to the Garnett farm with the sheriff on the night of the storm. That man had been Dr. Marvin Doolie.

The doc was beginning to be irritated by Gault's unblinking staring. "If you got somethin' in your craw, mister," he snapped, "spit it out."

"I was wonderin'," Gault said bluntly, "what you and the sheriff was doin' at the Garnett place in the middle of the night." Gault had to count back in his mind. How long had it been? "Three nights ago."

Doolie came stiffly erect and glanced at Olsen. But the sheriff folded his hands placidly and said, "Mr. Gault has got a suspicious mind, Doc. And I guess we can't blame him too much. For nearly a year he's been runnin' in hard luck, and then, to set things off, he went and got hisself shot by Shorty Pike. Accident, of course."

Doolie nodded. "Shorty told us about that. Misunderstandin' about some Garnett cows, wasn't it? Hard luck—but that's the kind of thing that happens when you stray on the other fellow's range."

"Maybe," Gault said dryly. "Whatever the reason, I did get myself shot. Now I'm wonderin' why you didn't bother to come and have a look at me, long as you was on the place anyway. You are a doc, ain't you?"

Doolie flushed pink and glanced at the sheriff for guidance. "And a first-class doc at that," Olsen said blandly. If you'd needed lookin' at, he would of looked at you. But Miss Esther said you was doin' fine and there wasn't no use botherin' you."

Gault smiled at them. "I see. But you still haven't said what you were doin' on the prairie in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm."

Doolie smiled as though the effort pained him. "Maybe that's because it's none of your business, Mr. Gault. However…" He glanced at the sheriff, and Olsen nodded ever so slightly. "However, I don't mind tellin' you. A hand over at Circle-R headquarters got hisself busted up when a horse fell on him, and I was tendin' him. On the way back to town there was the thunderstorm, so we stopped by the Garnett place to dry out."

Gault looked at them. The little doc had, more or less, explained his own movements. Sheriff Grady Olsen, apparently, did not feel obligated to explain his movements to anyone. In a tone that was bland to the point of indifference, the lawman asked, "Doc, what do you make out of this?"

Doolie leaned forward and stared at the articles on the table. He picked up the gold watch and inspected it minutely. After a long silence he turned his attention to the pearls. "One of the passengers on the Fort Belknap stage that was held up—didn't she report losin' a string of beads like this?"

The sheriff's head dropped in a heavy nod. "I figgered the same thing when I seen it. I'll get a letter off to that express agent. What was his name?"

"Sewell," Gault said without thinking. "Wirt Sewell."

Something happened behind the sheriff's eyes. "I didn't know you and Sewell was acquainted."

Now it was Gault's turn to act mysterious, and he took a grim pleasure in watching the lines of concern form around Olsen's eyes. "We met," he said shortly. He leaned forward and suddenly his voice came out harsh and angry. "You've worn a badge a long time, Sheriff. Long enough to know what this means." He pointed to the articles on the table. "These things tie Colly Fay to a stage robbery. And Shorty Pike ties to Colly, and both of them tie to your deputy who put them on his payroll. In one way or another, that connects the sheriff's office with Wolf Garnett… and the death of my wife."

Olsen made a rumbling sound in his throat. He kicked back his chair and stood up. "I know how you feel about your wife, but that don't give you any right to lay the blame on this office. I'm warnin' you, don't dip your horns in my business."

Gault pushed his own chair back and stood up. "This makes it my business," he said, showing the small gold ring. When he got to the doorway he turned for a moment and asked, "How about that .45 of mine?"

"I'll ask my deputy where he put it. When I see him."

Gault entered the Day and Night Bar with his Winchester cradled in the crook of his right arm. He paid for a schooner of sour beer and said, "I want to talk to Harry Wompler."

The barkeep, a fat, sleepy-eyed ex-muleskinner, looked him over carefully. Gault had learned early that Wompler was not an easy man to locate. For more than an hour he had been passed from saloon to saloon, and now he was at the end of the line, in the dirt-floored Day and Night.

"Take a beer for yourself," Gault said blandly. "And draw one for Harry." He put some silver on the bar.

"You a pal of Harry's?"

"Not a pal, exactly. But we may have the same enemies."

The barkeep grinned and drew himself a beer. It was clear that any enemy of Olsen's was a friend of the barkeep's. "There's Harry Wompler, over in the corner, but don't be surprised if he won't talk to you. Harry ain't been none too sociable since he lost his deputy's badge. Put great store in that nickel-plated star, Harry did, before Grady Olsen took it away from him."

The former deputy sheriff of Standard County lay facedown across the table, his head on his arms, snoring lustily. Gault put a beer on the table and pulled up a chair. "I want to talk to you, Wompler."

Harry snorted and grunted and went on with his snoring.

"About Grady Olsen." Gault shook him gently. Wompler's head dangled lifelessly on his scrawny neck. He snored on.

"And Wolf Garnett."

Harry didn't budge. Gault shoved the full schooner toward him and said, "I brought you a beer."

A muscle alongside the former deputy's neck began to twitch. He lifted his head and stared blearily at Gault. He pulled the beer to him, with all the tenderness of a new mother holding her first child, and he fumbled it to his mouth and drank steadily until the heavy glass mug was empty.

"Who are you?"

"Frank Gault. An old line rider called Yorty told me to look you up when I got to New Boston. I'm tryin' to find out about Wolf Garnett."

"Find out what?"

Gault couldn't bring himself to talk about Martha in a place like the Day and Night. "It's personal." Then, because Wompler seemed to be drifting back to sleep, he asked, "Can I buy you another beer?"

Harry nodded heavily, as if he were carrying the weight of the world on the back of his neck. "Make it whiskey."

The barkeep knew his customers well. He had already set two glasses and a full bottle on the table. The former deputy forced himself erect, sloshed some whiskey into a glass and downed it. "Nothin' to tell," he said haltingly, like a crippled man learning to walk. "About Wolf Garnett. He's dead."

"About the sheriff then?"

Wompler stared at him for a full minute without making a sound. He was a youngish man, still in his twenties. Once he might have been considered handsome, but a steady diet of the Day and Night's raw corn whiskey had taken care of that. His lower lip protruded curiously, giving him a pouting look. His face bristled with a week's growth of beard, but it was round and strangely youthful. He looked, Gault thought, to himself, like a sixty-year-old baby with pouchy eyes. "Why," he asked, "do you want to know about the sheriff?"

"I think he's mixed up somehow with the Wolf Garnett bunch. What's left of the bunch, anyway."

Wompler stared at him, blinking his watery eyes. Suddenly he began laughing. The sound was eerily hollow coming out of that bearded baby face.

Gault's own voice turned cold. "I didn't know I'd said somethin' funny."

"You did, though. I didn't think there was a man in Standard County—or Texas, for that matter—that didn't know about Grady Olsen and the Garnetts." He poured himself another drink and Gault noticed that his hands were steadier now.

"Tell me about them."

"Simplest thing in the world. For four years Olsen's been makin' moon eyes at Esther Garnett. Him old enough to be her pa. And then some."

Gault stared at the derelict in amazement. Since the night of the thunderstorm he had often tried to explain the sheriff's odd behavior—but this possibility had not occurred to him. "Olsen's in love with Miss Garnett?"

"Like a moon-eyed calf." Harry helped himself to another drink. "It's the reason he fired me."

The story was taking some unexpected turns. Grinning loosely, Wompler wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "Me and Esther—I guess ever'body in the county knowed she took a shine to me. That's why he had to get me out of the way. Took away my badge." The old baby face turned ugly. "I guess that ain't the way you heard it, though."

"I heard that Olsen let you go for bein' too thick with a gang of rustlers."

Wompler's eyes were losing their focus. "Believe anything you please. It's all the same to me."

Gault sat for a moment digesting what he had heard. "Do you know a stock detective named Del Torgason?"

"Torgason?" Wompler's tongue was beginning to thicken. "Torgason and me are the only ones in Standard County that'll talk back to Olsen."

"Why would Torgason want to make an enemy of the sheriff?"

"It ain't that he wants to. He just don't give a damn. The big men in this part of Texas are the cowmen, and they're the ones that pay his salary. Not even Olsen would go out of his way to rile a cowman."

"I was beginning to get the feelin' that everybody in the county kowtowed to Olsen. The cowmen don't?"

"Cowmen," the former lawman smiled slackly, "don't kowtow to anybody."

"Where can I find Torgason?"

Wompler sensed that the period of free liquor was about to end. Quickly, he sloshed himself another drink. "In the Association office, if he's in town. At the far end of the street, over the bath house."

The bath house occupied a space in the broad back alley behind the New Boston Gentlemen's Barber Shop. The county office of the cattlemen's association was a boxlike structure atop the bath house, sitting alongside a metal hot water tank. It was reached by an outside stairway, as were most second story establishments in New Boston.

Gault climbed the stairs and stepped through the open doorway. There was a rolltop desk, a battered oak chair. On the plank wall there was a large calendar for the year 1882, an advertisement for Dr. J. J. Simpson's Electric Bitters. Beside the calendar, dangling from a length of bit chain, was a North Texas Stock Raisers' Brand Book. There was no sign of stock detective Del Torgason.

A handyman from the bath house came up the stairway with an armload of cowchips and dumped them into the firebox beneath the hot water tank. Gault stepped out to the landing and asked, "Can you tell me where to find Torgason?"

The handyman looked him over. "Who's askin'?"

"My name's Frank Gault."

That was all the handyman needed to know. "Nope," he said shortly, and stumped back down the stairs. It was clear that the sheriff had not been pleased by Gault's return to New Boston, and it hadn't taken long for the word to get around. Gault picked up the buckskin and moved on to the wagon yard.

The hostler, Abe Tricer, was waiting for him with a vindictive grin. "Sorry, Gault, I just rented out the last of my camp shacks."

The shacks stood against the livery barn with their doors wide open and obviously vacant. "How about I throw my bed in the loft."

"Town passed an ordinance against that."

"Ordinance?"

"Drifters sleepin' in the loft like to burn the place down."

Gault knew it would be useless to argue the matter. "Do you think you could feed and water the buckskin?"

The hostler shrugged. "Price of oats has gone up since the last time you was through here."

"Somehow," Gault told him, "I figgered it would." He stripped the buckskin and put the animal in a stall. Then he returned to the Day and Night.

Wompler was at the same table, staring into space. Only after Gault set a full bottle in front of him did he begin to look alive. "Torgason ain't in his office," Gault said. "I tried askin' some New Boston citizens about him, but it didn't get me anywhere."

Wompler downed a drink and chuckled. "They know the sheriff wouldn't like it. And what Sheriff Olsen don't like we don't get much of here in Standard County."

"You know where I might find Torgason?"

The former deputy closed his eyes, and for a moment Gault was afraid he'd fallen asleep. At last he said, "This mornin' I was down at the livery corral. Torgason came by to get his horse. There was somethin' said about the Circle-R."

The name had a familiar ring. The oldtime cowhand, Elbert Yorty, rode line for the Circle-R. Also it had been an injured Circle-R hand that Doc Doolie had been tending the night of the thunderstorm—according to Doc Doolie. "Is there anything queer about the Circle-R? Or about Torgason heading that way today?"

Wompler looked at him blearily. "Nothin' I can think of."

"You ever have any trouble with the outfit, when you was deputy?"

The ex-lawman shook his head. "Nope. What you lookin' for?"

It was a reasonable question, but Gault didn't have a reasonable answer. What was he looking for? Gault only knew that the fire in his gut wouldn't let him rest until something was done. "What I'm lookin' for is not something I can put a finger on. It's a feelin'."

"About the sheriff?"

Gault nodded. "That's part of it."

"Is it true what they're sayin'? That Wolf Garnett killed your wife?"

The former deputy, Gault decided, was more alert than he appeared to be. "It's true." He waited a full minute for Wompler to go on, but the ex-lawman only shrugged and let the matter drop. Gault said, "What's the best way for me to get to the Circle-R? I want to talk to Torgason."

"He's close-mouthed. You won't get much out of him, even if he knowed somethin' to tell." Wompler brightened slightly as a thought occurred to him. "Have you got the money to pay for a rent animal over at the livery corral?"

"I guess so. Why?"

"If there's a chance of puttin' somethin' over on Olsen, I'd like to deal myself in. You pay for the rent animal and I'll ride with you to the Circle-R." Gault hesitated, and Wompler added flatly, "I ain't as useless as I might look. I can use a gun, if I have to."

Gault was vaguely disturbed by the way he said it. "Do you expect to have to?"

"Don't expect nothin' but tricks and slick dealin' when doin' business with Grady Olsen. Will you pay for the horse?"

Wompler was not the kind of man that Gault would have chosen to ride with. But he found himself nodding, reluctantly.

Wompler sighed, smiled crookedly, and with considerable effort pushed himself to his feet. "One more thing," he said, tucking the bottle of liquor under his arm. "You might pay the barkeep for this."

Against his better judgment, Gault paid for the whiskey. They left the Day and Night and walked the short distance to the wagon yard. The exertion left Wompler winded, but his watery eyes had cleared a bit and his speech was not so slurred. "Of course," the former deputy said, "I don't aim to drink this down all at once." He fondly caressed the bottle. "It's just that I've been promisin' myself for a long time that I'd kill Grady Olsen if I ever got the chance. And I might just do it if I was to catch myself completely sober."