Ike Loney tensed at the sound of the approaching horse. Only one man knew where he had holed up, and he wasn't expected. No surprise visitor would be welcome.
Loney was a compact man, as Westerners go, five foot seven inches, 140 pounds, face dominated by the black mustache that the Arizona Territory had plastered across one of its wanted posters. Small, he might be, but the resolute set to his stubbled jaw identified him as a man who made the world dance to his tune. Clad this morning only in his bloodied longjohns, and those unbuttoned to the waist and peeled back to expose the left side of his skimpy chest where he had been peppered by the blast of the shotgun, he had been sagging at the small table in what had once been the guard shack to an long-abandoned mine on the eastern slope of the Whetstone Mountains, while he mustered strength to face the pain as he resumed the task of digging out the remaining buckshot.
But now Loney had a visitor. He pushed himself up to his feet with his good arm and stepped over to the wall where his holster was hanging. In a smooth gesture, he eased his revolver into his hand. He turned, faced the door, and waited. The horse come to a halt outside the cabin and Loney heard the saddle creak as the horseman swung down. When his visitor tromped up to the door, Loney raised his pistol, aimed at the center of the door, and cocked. His visitor, whoever he was, had made a one-way trip.
"Hello the house," the newcomer sang out.
Loney down-cocked, slid his pistol back in its holster. As he eased himself back into the chair at the table, he said, "Come."
The newcomer shrugged out of his sheepskin jacket and shook off the snow that had been falling during the ride from Tombstone then reached out his hand to Loney. He was a buff man, with an easy grin on his face that brought a smile to a man's face automatically, as it did now to Loney. He was dressed as a city man might to go for a ride in the rough desert country of the San Pedro Valley . Of an age with Loney, a sense of self-assuredness,, but not a man of the saddle, a city man with a face which lacked the deep sun-darkened skin of men of the outdoors . But the business they'd done together made this man's unexpected visit welcome, especially in his current need. Loney lacked the energy to rise and grasp the sheriff's welcoming handshakes, but his gesture was welcome enough.
"Been forgetting to shave, Ike," the newcomer joshed. "What if some pretty rancher's daughter comes calling, looking for a man of action?"
Despite his fatigue, Loney smiled. "Didn't expect to see you."
"Stage driver said you got tagged. I knew you planned to be far on your trail, but I figured I'd ride out just in case you're needing some help."
Loney started to shrug, and then stopped because of the pain. "Could have been worse. I'm sitting here." He looked up meaningfully. "But I got the job done for you."
"Done him better'n I could've asked. Took the bastard a full agonizing day before he cashed out." He extracted a piece of paper from his pocket and passed it over. "Lancaster lasted long enough to give me a description of the man who done it to him."
Loney picked up the paper. "Short, dark-haired, wears a Stetson. Not even a drawing. Be hard to run a man in on this."
"Guess that's why it's not Dead or Alive. Wells, Fargo's got a hotshot team of investigators coming down from Denver to run you to the ground and sweat a confession out of you so the hanging can be all right and proper."
"Got to find me first. I'm pulling out for Tucson in the morning and then on the train to California to have a good time spending what I earned here. More than $10,000. I've got a fatter money belt then I've had in ten years of making gunsmoke," Loney said.
While they were talking, Loney slid his bloodied Bowie Knife across the table. "I spent most of yesterday afternoon digging up the buckshot that son of a bitch gave me, but some are hard to get to. Maybe you can give me a hand."
The knife fit easily in the visitor's hand as he stepped around the table and squatted next to Loney. "Take a pull on your whiskey first, then I'll start carving away."
Loney stuffed his left hand under his butt to get the arm out of the way, held tight to the table with the other, braced himself and said "go ahead." The pain was no less under someone else's hands than under his own, and to distract himself, Loney made conversation.
In five minutes, three buckshot had been sliced out, in what would've taken Loney half an hour, but there were still several more to go. He signaled to rest a moment. "Lucky day for me when you matched me with that Arizona Territorial dodger. Maybe being a notorious outlaw has its advantages."
"I see a couple more pellets," the visitor said as he knelt by Loney's side again and raised the Bowie knife . Loney clenched his teeth in anticipation and nodded to go ahead.
The knife slipped an eighth of an inch into Loney's side and probed for the pellet. ""You're a good man to work with, Ike. Just one more thing, since you're still here." Loney was listening. "Need to make sure that our little deal stays secret between us."
The pellet popped out and Loney could speak again. "You got nothing to worry about. I'll never rat you out."
"I know." The Bowie knife rammed hard up to the hilt and twisted viciously on its way out, as the killer quickly backed out of splatter range.
Loney gasped as pain spread across his innards. "You stinking polecat . . . " He slumped sideways, and hit the floor with a loud thud.
The cleanup took less than five minutes. While the aorta finished spewing blood, the killer gathered up the dead man's saddle, saddlebags, and gear and dumped them in the mine's air shaft. Then he dragged the corpse through the snow and toppled it in. The falling snow would quickly cover the two parallel tracks made by the dead man's boot heels. The killer gave one final look around the cabin. Anyone from town who swung by the shack, maybe as a base for elk hunting, would know the shack had been used as a hideout , but everything looked like the outlaw had pulled out with his loot.
David Mitchell's last visit to the Cochise County Courthouse in Tombstone had been lacking in either the freedom he had always valued or the purpose he felt now. Less than a day it had taken for the prosecutor to make his case, the jury to nod their agreement, and the judge to pronounce the expected, unwelcome, words: "Five years in Yuma."
A strange path he had been on, after youthful years earning his living by relieving Wells, Fargo stages of extra weight. A free life, a life dedicated to pleasure, and he now knew, an empty life. He would claim no credit if St. Peter made him explain how he came by the badge on his pocket. All credit belonged to the man by his side, Chet Collins, at five foot six inches the biggest man he had ever known. A man he had been inspired to be like, to try to imitate, even if it meant giving up the freedom to take what he wanted and instead to work for what he would have called paltry wages.
"It was a better bargain than I could have imagined," he told his partner as they walked up the steps to the Courthouse.
"Badge stink, I think you called it back then," Collins reminded his colleague and friend.
"Turns out, it was the fragrance of good honest sweat."
As a courtesy and sign of respect—and to size up what, if any cooperation might be expected—the two Wells, Fargo agents routinely began any assignment by introducing themselves to the local sheriff.
Sheriff Alvin Dinkins greeted them jovially. "Always glad to have someone do my work for me," he told them. "Don't know you'll get far." He explained that the robbery and murder had taken place at night, "by the time I learned of the robbery and got out to Rocky Point where poor Butch Lancaster was murdered, the trail was getting cold. The robber rode back toward Benson a few miles, I could tell that. Then he waded in a small creek. Couldn't find where he came out."
"We're not trackers ourselves," Collins said. "If you couldn't follow it, we'd have been no better." The tone of deference Collins had developed over the years to ease any tension in the natural resentment to "outsiders trying to do my job" that the agents had encountered from Idaho to Wyoming to New Mexico.
"You're welcome to try," Dinkins said. "I figure the robber is long gone, but you boys ain't limited by county line jurisdiction problems, and maybe you can track him down. Sure hope so. Folks liked Butch Lancaster "
"We'll do our best," Collins assured the sheriff. "Wells, Fargo's records show that stage robberies are down from the early years in Tombstone. How about crime generally?"
"There are our share of bad actors out in the bush," Dinkins said, "but mainly they make their money stealing Mexican cattle." Dinkins told the agents. "All sorts of robberies are down."
"Down since you been sheriff?"
Dinkins nodded, modestly avoiding any claim of credit. "Not as much money slopping around as in the early days. Never had a haul this big since I put on the badge."
As they got to up to leave, the agents promised to keep him up-to-date on whatever they found.
"The robber is long gone, your money with him," Dinkins said. "Good luck to you if you can find it. Folks here won't be happy until the murderer of Butch Lancaster is swinging from the gallows."
Dinkins watched the two agents leave his office with a politician's satisfaction. The more they looked, the less the Tombstone Epitaph could rant about his performance.
Since the driver of the stage quote was out on a run, the Tombstone Epitaph, as it turned out, was the next stop on the agents' itinerary. The Epitaph editor, always a good reporter, welcomed them to his shop and brought out the issues with reporting on the robbery and murder. But first he made sure he got their names and spelling right for his next issue. "Dave Mitchell? Name sounds familiar."
"Been here before," Mitchell admitted. "Wells, Fargo and me didn't see things the same way back then."
The newspaper report gave limited details about the robbery, nothing more than they had received from sheriff Dinkins. But there was a side-bar article expressing the community's grief at the loss of a "first-rate public spirited citizen" in Butch Lancaster. It concluded with the statement that the Republican Party would meet soon to select its new nominee for Sheriff.
The Tombstone Nugget went into more details about the robbery, focusing on the efforts of Sheriff Dinkins to track the robber and concluded that "no fault can be assigned to our competent sheriff that darkness and weather allowed the robber to escape."
"I notice you don't say much about Lancaster," Mitchell pointed out. "What do folks think about him?"
"He made himself popular in town, like politicians do, claiming he would bring law and order to Tombstone," the editor said.