West of the Law

Chapter 17

Luke Prescott swung out of the saddle and started to run, yelling at McBride to come after him.

McBride swung his leg over the mustang, got his foot caught up in the seat-cushion saddle and fell flat on his back. The black cantered past him as he climbed to his feet and pounded after Prescott.

Ahead of him the stream bank formed a sharp arc around a sandbar, a tall cottonwood standing at its center. Close by, a willow trailed its branches into the water, but McBride’s eyes were fixed on the ruined cabin that lay beyond the trees—and the body that hung in the doorway.

Prescott was standing a ways off from the crumbling soddy, the gray bandanna he wore around his neck pulled up over his nose and mouth. When McBride stepped next to him the stench hit him like a fist. Swarms of fat black flies buzzed busily around him, the usual slaughterhouse welcoming committee telling their tale.

‘‘She’s been dead for at least two days, maybe longer,’’ Prescott said, his voice muffled by the bandanna. ‘‘Little gal died hard.’’

A sod brick had eroded above the heavy pine frame of the doorway, leaving just enough space for a rope. The height of the entrance was only about six feet, but the young Chinese girl who hung there had been small and her down-turned toes dangled inches above the ground.

The rope around the girl’s neck had cut deep and it was hard to make out the details of her bloated features. But McBride was detective enough to determine that her neck wasn’t broken— she’d been strangled to death. She was dressed in the traditional knee-length tunic and loose, black pants of the Chinese woman.

Coyotes had tried to pull her down. That was obvious from her ragged pants and the blood on her legs and lower body. They had taken what they could.

The watch in McBride’s pocket was ticking, the world around them turning, but for he and Prescott time stood still as they tried to come to terms with what they were seeing.

A girl, a child really, had been brutally hanged. Why?

McBride laid his rifle on the grass at his feet. ‘‘Stay here, Luke,’’ he told Prescott.

The man nodded. He said, ‘‘Sure thing. I ain’t much inclined to get closer.’’

Last night’s rain had washed away any prints that might have been left by the girl’s killers, but above the doorway a section of the timber and sod roof was still in place.

McBride walked around to the back of the cabin and stepped inside. Half the roof had caved in and he was forced to pick his way through fallen beams and chunks of dry sod toward the door. A pack rat had made a nest in one corner and a scatter of black pellets on the dirt floor revealed where an owl had roosted.

He was behind the dead girl now, close to her body, and the smell of rotting flesh was almost unbearable. McBride put a hand over his mouth and nose and studied the soft, dry dirt behind the doorway. There was a single set of prints, the wide, low-heeled outlines of a miner’s boots. The square toes were facing the girl’s back.

McBride lurched away from the body and put it together when he reached the cleaner air outside.

The girl had been small and light, too light to strangle easily in the noose. A man, probably a miner, had stood behind the girl and pulled down on her body, hastening her death. It had not been an act of mercy. He, and presumably others with him, had wanted to make certain she died.

And Prescott had been right. The little Chinese girl had died hard, slowly and with much pain and fear.

But the question remained: Why?

‘‘We can’t leave her hanging there,’’ Prescott said when McBride rejoined him. ‘‘It isn’t decent.’’

‘‘No, it’s not,’’ McBride said.

‘‘Maybe we can bury her.’’

‘‘But not near deep enough.’’

‘‘Then what, John?’’

‘‘There are dry timbers in the cabin. We’ll burn her body.’’ He turned and looked at Prescott. ‘‘Go into the cabin and get the fire started.’’

‘‘Me?’’

‘‘Yes, you. Out here a man should know how to make a fire. He just never can tell when he’ll need one.’’

Prescott’s eyes revealed that he’d caught the irony, but he let it pass. ‘‘The smoke will be seen for miles and the men who did this could still be close.’’

‘‘So? We’re just a couple of travelers riding through pass-on-by country who happened to stop to give a dead girl a decent funeral. They won’t fault us for that, at least not much.’’

Prescott thought that through, then nodded and slipped the bandanna from his face. ‘‘I sure hope you know what you’re doing, John. And after it’s over, what then?’’

‘‘Like you say, the men who murdered the girl could be close. We will go find them.’’

‘‘And then?’’

McBride’s eyes were wintry. ‘‘We’ll kill them all, Luke. Everybody lives, but not everybody deserves to.’’

The little gunfighter grinned. ‘‘John McBride, I have the feeling you’d make a mighty bad enemy.’’

‘‘Believe it,’’ McBride said. He did not smile.

Together they cut down the girl’s body, an unpleasant task that had to be done, and laid her out as gently as they could on a pile of timbers. Despite the recent rain the wood was tinder-dry. Prescott used the pack rat’s nest for kindling and the old roof beams readily caught fire. When the timbers were blazing fiercely, sending up a thick column of gray smoke, they stepped back and watched the cabin burn.

‘‘We should say some words,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘What god would that little Celestial gal pray to?’’

‘‘The same god we pray to, I imagine. He might have a different name in China, that’s all.’’

‘‘Well, I don’t know any of the words anyhow,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘The times I watched men get buried, a preacher always read from the Book. Them was a heap of words and not something a man can easily recollect.’’

‘‘If we knew the words, we’d say them, Luke. I’d guess right about now the little Chinese girl knows that.’’

After the fire had died away to ashes, Prescott rounded up his horse and McBride reluctantly climbed onto the bony back of the mustang. As the sun dropped lower in the sky and their shadows grew long, they rode out of the meadow and again followed the wagon trail.

The trail wound upward through stands of ponderosa and aspen, curving around huge out-croppings of granite rock that grew more numerous as they climbed higher and the air thinned. After an hour the sun was a dull crimson ball low above the western horizon, adrift in a sky the color of ancient jade. A stiff breeze had picked up, whispering wild stories to the aspen that set their leaves to trembling.

They came up on the water tower of the Union Pacific just as the day was shading into night and the trail petered out to nothing. The tower stood on a siding and close to it was a piled-high pyramid of sawn logs for the furnaces of the locomotives. A small shed with a padlocked door stood a ways from the track, a wooden wheelbarrow leaning against one of its walls.

‘‘There’s nobody home,’’ Prescott said, drawing rein on his horse, his eyes restlessly searching the shadowed, aspen-covered hills that rose on either side of the rails.

‘‘If Trask’s men take the Chinese girls and opium off the trains here, there could be another wagon trail that we’re not seeing,’’ McBride said.

‘‘Unless they load them up and head for High Hopes right away,’’ Prescott said.

‘‘We didn’t meet anybody on the trail,’’ McBride said. He groaned softly and shifted uncomfortably on the mustang. ‘‘That means whoever murdered the Chinese girl is still around.’’

‘‘Or she may have been dead longer than we reckoned. If that’s the case, her killers could have taken the wagon trail before us.’’

McBride nodded. ‘‘There’s still enough light for us to scout around and see if there’s another trail headed away from the siding.’’

Prescott found the trail a few minutes later, a narrow wagon road cut through the aspen that had been just out of sight behind the log pile. He called McBride over and pointed at the hill rising above him.

‘‘The trail cuts across the saddleback. It’s got to end up somewhere. I’m betting at a cabin or maybe a cave.’’

‘‘We’ll leave the horses here and go take a look,’’ McBride said. ‘‘I don’t want to be slip-sliding on the back of the mustang when the shooting starts.’’

Prescott glanced at McBride’s gun in the shoulder holster. ‘‘You as good with that self-cocker as I heard?’’

‘‘I don’t know what you heard, but I’d say I’m fair to middling.’’

‘‘If there’s more than two of Trask’s men, you might want to try real hard to do better.’’

McBride smiled. ‘‘I’ll try, Luke. Yes, I’ll try real hard.’’

He watched Prescott swing out of the saddle, briefly envied the man’s casual elegance, then clambered off the back of the mustang. He had not eaten since breakfast, and there hadn’t been much of that, and his stomach rumbled loudly as he and Prescott took to the wagon trail and climbed toward the gap of the hollow hill.

They drew the night around them like a cloak and became one with the darkness. Very near, an owl asked its question to the heedless wind, then demanded an answer again. Prescott, a horseman unused to walking, made his awkward way along the sunbaked clay of a wagon-wheel track. His spurs were chiming, bootheels thudding on dry pine needles. McBride was glad they were not facing Apache. The dime novel he’d read said the savages heard every sound, even the faintest whisper, and would suddenly come charging out of the dark whooping and hollering, waving their murderous tomahawks.

He remembered a line from the book that had struck him: ‘‘Many a lovely lass in the first blush of maidenhood they’ve undone, many a stalwart frontiersman they’ve murdered, many a poor old mother’s heart they’ve broken.’’

McBride nodded to himself. That was a haunting line, penned by a good writer. Someday he’d like to read—

‘‘The gap is just ahead,’’ Prescott said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘‘Keep your rifle up and ready.’’

They reached the crest of the gap and stopped, staring into the night. The moon was rising, but its light was dim, lying thin on the land. McBride could make out the slope of the hill falling away steeply from where he stood, and something else—the lights of a cabin hanging like lanterns in the darkness.

‘‘Just as I thought,’’ Prescott whispered. ‘‘They hold the girls here for a spell before taking them to High Hopes.’’

‘‘How can you be sure it’s Trask’s men?’’ McBride asked. ‘‘It could be railroaders.’’

‘‘I’m not sure. That’s why we’ll get closer and take a look around.’’

‘‘Then you’d better take off your spurs, Luke. You make more racket than church bells on Sunday morning.’’

Prescott grinned, his teeth flashing white in the gloom. ‘‘We ain’t going to no prayer meeting, that’s for sure.’’ He bent, unbuckled his spurs and set them atop a tree stump by the trail. ‘‘Ready?’’

‘‘I’m ready.’’

‘‘Then let’s take a stroll.’’

The sky was ablaze with stars and the ascending moon wore a halo as the two men made their way down the slope and onto the flat. A mist wreathed through the silver trunks of the aspen and twined like a great gray snake across the low grassland, soundless as a ghost.

Closer now, McBride could make out the shape of the cabin, even see the smoke from the chimney, tied into bowknots by the wind. The air smelled of trees and the tang of frying bacon and his mouth watered and his stomach rumbled the more.

He followed Prescott as the man, crouching low and keeping his distance, scuttled past the front of the cabin. Two windows showed to the front, rectangles of orange light in the gloom. From inside McBride heard a man laugh loud and harsh and thump a table with the flat of his hand.

To the right of the cabin was a smaller building, a windowless shed with a slanted roof. The door was locked shut by a heavy wooden bolt. Beyond the shed was a pole corral where four horses dozed, and pulled up next to it was a freight wagon. Behind the seat, a massive iron cage took up the entire bed.

Those were Trask’s men in the cabin all right. McBride tightened his grip on the Winchester as he took a knee beside Prescott. He pointed to the cabin and whispered, ‘‘Trask’s boys.’’

The gunfighter nodded. ‘‘Figgered that.’’ He rose to his feet. ‘‘Let’s go be sociable, just like we were visiting kinfolk.’’

Before McBride could protest, Prescott strode toward the cabin, his rifle hanging in his right hand. When he was twenty feet from the door he stopped and yelled, ‘‘Hello the cabin!’’

As McBride joined him he heard the scrape of a chair across a wood floor and a moment later the door swung open. A huge man stood silhouetted in the doorway, what looked to be a shotgun in his hands. ‘‘What the hell do you want?’’

Firing from the hip, Prescott shot him in the belly.