The Killers Read online

  “Where did you find him? Was it by the Eldredge place?”

  The farmer looked scared. “Nobody said that. It was out that way. Nobody said the Eldredges done it. Not me, you bet.”

  I dragged the dead man out by the heels and when he hit the street he rolled. The back of his head was all blown away. I dragged the body up on the porch and went back into the cells to get a blanket to keep the flies away till burying time. People crowded in asking questions, but all the excitement wasn’t enough to bring Fallon and his boys out of the hotel. While I was tucking in the dead man, I took a quick look at the hotel, but they didn’t even show their faces.

  “This town got an undertaker?” I asked one of the boys from the livery stable.

  “Got a carpenter, he’ll do,” the kid said. “I’ll go find him.”

  Now it was my business, so I left the corpse where it was and walked over to the hotel. There was nobody in the lobby except the clerk, and he was still mad about his necktie. “Up in his room resting,” the clerk said. “What’s going on out there in the street?”

  “You just lost a customer,” I told him. I pried the room number out of him without having to get tough about it. I knocked and the door opened right away. The hard case had one hand on the doorknob, one hand on his gun.

  “I want to see Fallon,” I said.

  The hard case didn’t budge. I guess he thought he had to act mean in front of his boss, or maybe he needed the practice. “Who’re you?” he asked.

  I seemed to run into boys like that all the time. “I’m a drummer in ladies’ underpants,” I told him, tapping the badge with my left hand. “Where’s Fallon?”

  “Let him in,” Fallon said from the bed. I went in but Fallon didn’t get up. The two other hard cases sat in chairs by the window and there were glasses and a whiskey bottle on the dresser. I walked to the window, and from there I could see the jail with the dead man out front under the blanket.

  Fallon watched me from the bed. “Something I can do for you, Sheriff?”

  “Looks like you’re short a man,” I told him.

  Fallon looked at the three gunmen. “I can count, Sheriff,” he said.

  Fallon had loose liver-colored lips and the words didn’t come out of his mouth—they straggled out, as if he had trouble keeping his mind on the proceedings. Everything he said sounded tired and kind of sneering. Even with a smile I could see why the voters had turned him down. In spite of his fancy clothes, there was something dirty about the son of a bitch.

  “A farmer just brought in one of your boys,” I said. “He’s dead, but I guess you know that. I thought maybe you could tell me how it happened? Did the Eldredge boys do it?”

  “Never heard of them,” Fallon drawled. “Any of you boys know that name?”

  They shook their heads.

  “There, you see,” Fallon said. “Must have been somebody else shot Mike.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” I said.

  “Watch your mouth, deputy,” one of the hard cases warned me. “That’s Malachi Fallon you’re talking to.”

  “Not deputy—I’m the sheriff. You got that now, have you? I’d like for you to try hard.”

  I guess I didn’t sound much like a public servant. Fallon didn’t like it. Still not getting up, he said, “What’s biting on you? You got something against my boys? Against me? You barged in here asking questions and we gave you answers. You asked about these Eldredge people and we said no. All right, somebody shot poor Mike when he wandered off by himself. What do you want us to do—tear our clothes like Indian women? You’re the law. Go catch the killer.”

  “You didn’t say anything about looking for your hat.”

  Fallon swung his legs off the bed and sat up. He snapped his fingers and one of the hard cases handed him a cigar, then lit it for him. “Don’t push it too hard, friend,” he said to me. “Save the smart talk for the Saturday drunks. You know who I am, you ought to know better than to crowd me.”

  Fallon laughed. “Hey, you’re not planning to arrest us, are you, Sheriff? Being a lawyer, I’d have to submit, but my three law clerks wouldn’t like it.”

  Fallon’s three law clerks guffawed at the great man’s joke.

  “Been nice talking to you, Sheriff,” Fallon said. “Come around any time you need legal advice.”

  Fallon lay down again and put his hands behind his head, the cigar tilted in his flabby mouth. Eyes closed as if he couldn’t stand to see any more of the world’s hardships, he drawled for his supper. “One of you boys—I don’t say which one—do a tired, hungry man a favor. Go down and tell that fool clerk I want that food today.”

  The three gunmen thought that was funny too. They thought everything Fallon said was funny when he wasn’t laying into them.

  I went out.

  Chapter Three

  The old man who ran the restaurant told me how to get out to the Eldredge place, and I found it about where he said it was, five miles from town in a dead-end canyon in a scatter of low hills that ran up into the mountains. A trail forked away from the main road and I followed it, remarking to myself that it was pretty poor country to raise anything but snakes. None of the land around Salter City was any too good; and it looked like the late-arriving Eldredges had settled on the worst of it.

  I rested my animal and looked at a sign that warned me to keep out or get shot. Just about every word on that sign was spelled wrong, but the meaning was clear. Hopefully, I took the star off my shirt pocket and pinned it high on my vest. Maybe they wouldn’t shoot me right away if they saw the star. The sun was well past the mid-point between east and west, but it was still hot as a bunkhouse stove in a Montana winter. I gave the animal water and drank some myself. Maybe I was making too much out of Fallon’s being in Salter City; still I had the feeling that big trouble was getting set to explode.

  There was another sign as threatening as the first, and when I rode past it without stopping to spell out the words, a rifle cracked and a bullet touched the crown of my hat without taking it off my head. I reined in and waited. There was no more shooting, and that could mean the shooter was thrifty with his ammunition or that he was using a muzzle-loading rifle.

  That’s what he was using all right, a long-barreled small-caliber squirrel gun, and when he had another shot ready, he poked the long barrel out from behind a pile of rocks tangled over with bushes, and yelled at me to turn my animal and ride back the other way. He didn’t ask me who I was, what I wanted. “You git,” was all he said.

  I could make out the rifle barrel; that was all. He sounded young, and that could be worse than old. I don’t know how I knew he was sighting on that damn sheriff’s star. What I did know for sure was that a bullet from that long rifle would shove the lawman’s badge halfway through my chest.

  When I didn’t move, he yelled, “You git and git fast. This here is private property. We don’t allow nobody in here.”

  I yelled back that he was shooting at the county sheriff.

  Whoever he was, he was a good shot and a slow thinker. It took him a while. “You ain’t the sheriff,” he yelled. “Even if you was t’wouldn’t make no difference. I said nobody comes in here.”

  “I’m coming in,” I said. “Now you signal your daddy and tell him that. Do that or shoot me. Then they’ll hang you, sonny.”

  The boy with the long gun came up slowly from behind the rocks. Fallon’s glossy hat was too big for him, so big that it came down halfway over his ears. The hat sure as hell didn’t go with the bleached-out coveralls he was wearing. He looked like what he was, a half savage, ignorant, dirty mountain youngster; and I knew he could put a bullet through any part of me he wanted.

  “Stay still,” he said. Then he let out the most godawful howl I ever heard from any man, white or Indian. The first howl was drawn out; he added a couple of yips at the end. He grinned before he remembered to look mean again. I didn’t do anything.

  It didn’t take them long to get there. They didn’t all come from the s
ame direction; they swarmed in from all sides: men and boys from the snot-nosed age to well past seventy. And there wasn’t one of them that wasn’t toting some kind of rifle. I swear a man could put together a gun museum with the weapons they were pointing at me. More than twenty rifles in all. The young ones carried the oldest weapons, and some of their guns were old enough to have gone south during the Mexican War. The guns were old, but I wouldn’t have bet a nickel that they wouldn’t still shoot straight and true.

  But there were new guns too. One of the new rifles was in the hands of a shaggy-bearded old man in an honest-to-god wool hat, a real mountain headpiece. The old man didn’t take his fierce eyes off me while he spoke to the boy. After the boy explained, the old man rapped him across the skull with the barrel of the .44/.40 Winchester. I guessed that was for not following orders to the letter, meaning that he should have killed or crippled me first, then started his howling.

  The old man told the boy to pick up his dropped squirrel gun; and I was reminded of how a she-cougar teaches her cubs how to fight by batting them around. After saying something I couldn’t make out, the old man came closer. Close enough to talk without yelling.

  “You want to come in, then come on,” he growled at me, suspicious as only a mountain man can be with strangers. “First you let your guns slide. That means all your guns. We find a hideaway gun in your bag we’ll kill you. May do that anyhow.”

  They started a rush when my guns hit the dirt; the old man roared at them to get back. “You take charge, Willy,” he told the boy with Fallon’s hat.

  They had my guns and I figured it wouldn’t get me killed if I moved my hands. I tapped the star on my chest. “This mean nothing to you?”

  The old man’s eyes were red-rimmed and angry. I don’t know what he was so mad about. Maybe it was just his way. “Less than dog shit,” he told me. “You move your hands again you’ll lose a finger. Let the reins go. We’ll lead you in.”

  That’s what they did. The boy with Fallon’s fancy hat took the reins and that’s how I got to see the Eldredge place, with every male Eldredge pointing a rifle at me, not just ready to kill me, but wanting to kill me. It was like they had brought their Smoky Mountain ways down to south Texas; and I wasn’t about to argue one little bit. Not then anyway.

  The trail took a turn between some big rocks, and then I saw the sprawl of cabins along a creek shaded by cottonwoods. The cabins were built mountain style and there was that good old mountain stink that you never forget once you smell it. There was a still going full blast out in the open. The smell of mash was the best smell in the place. A lot of women and girls stood around looking as mean-tempered as hostile Comanche squaws. Maybe not as clean and pretty as Comanche squaws. There were the usual starved mongrel dogs scratching and biting in the dust. Looking at the Eldredge place, I sure hoped old Luke was enjoying his vacation.

  “Get down,” the old man ordered. “You want a drink of whiskey?”

  I guess I must have looked surprised.

  “Common manners,” the old man said. He didn’t smile when he added, “Could be your last.”

  The boy called Willy was the old man’s favorite. He ran to fill a tin cup with whiskey and gave it to the old man. The old man gave it to me. I tasted it. No doubt about it—the genuine article, old No. 1 Pop-Skull, all of five minutes old.

  I wasn’t a friend, so the old man didn’t join me. He rooted in his coveralls for a plug of chewing tobacco. While I drank the moonshine he worked up a spit.

  One of the curs came too close; the old man puckered up and got him in the eye with a snap shot. The dog howled and ran away. “Time to talk,” the old man announced. “Talk plain and not too long.”

  I explained about Luke, the mail order bride; how I came to be taking Luke’s place. The old man chewed and spat, holding the .44/.40 across his bony knees. “That’s the first part of it,” I went on. “The second part—why I’m here—is a man named Malachi Fallon.”

  The old man spoke around his wad of wet tobacco. “That’s only why you think you’re here. You’re here because I let you be here. Zachariah Eldredge is who I am.”

  I said I was pleased to make his acquaintance.

  “Don’t be,” he said.

  “This man Fallon rode out this way,” I said. “He asked for the Eldredge place by name, so it’s no guess. The boy there is wearing Fallon’s hat.”

  “You calling Willy a thief?”

  I shook my head. “Fallon rode out this way with four men. When he got back to town he was missing one man, one hat. Later a farmer brought in the fourth man with a bullet through his head.”

  “Don’t say,” Zack Eldredge remarked, not looking too interested.

  “You wouldn’t want to tell me what Fallon was doing out here?” I was used to most all kinds of bad liquor, but that Eldredge moonshine buzzed in my head.

  “Wouldn’t and couldn’t,” the old man declared hard and flat. “Don’t know the man. Don’t want to know him. The same goes for you.”

  I never saw a man more disinclined to help the law of the land. Zack Eldredge had a way of making everything he said sound final, like Moses setting the Israelites straight on this and that. It must have worked well with all his murderous kinfolk because he was still boss in his old age, but it might not be enough to stop Malachi Fallon. Neither man knew how dangerous the other could be, so there wouldn’t be any backing off.

  I told the old man I didn’t want any more whiskey.

  “Then I’ll take a drink,” he announced. He wouldn’t drink with me; now it was all right to drink by himself.

  “Maybe Fallon and his men threatened you,” I said. “They got tough and you killed one of the gunslingers. No jury can fault you for that.”

  Laughing didn’t come easy to the old mountaineer. The laugh started with a rasping chuckle in the back of his throat; it ended with a few short barks. He glared at me with fierce red eyes. “Nobody threatens an Eldredge,” he said. “You seen my boys. You think they look threatened?”

  I had to admit they didn’t look worried. I tried to tell him that killing Fallon’s gunman was just the beginning. I said Fallon could come back with forty men. Once more I tried to get him to answer the big question: what was Malachi Fallon doing in Salter City?

  “Time’s up,” Zack Eldredge said. “No more questions, no more talk. Now you climb back on that horse and don’t you ever come back. You tend to your business and we’ll tend to ours. This Fallon could be our business. Not for you to ask and not for me to say. Since you seem to know all about him, suppose you carry a message. Zachariah Eldredge don’t give a damn for four, nor forty, nor four hundred hired gunmen. The next man steps on my land gets buried where he falls. That includes you.”

  I don’t know what made me turn my head, but when I did turn it I saw the yellow-haired girl watching me from inside the door of the old man’s cabin. One thing she didn’t look like was an Eldredge. She looked no more like the other female scarecrows than a racehorse does a mule. Even in a crowd of pretty big city women she would have stood out; there on the Eldredge place she didn’t belong at all; and the green silk dress she wore cost enough to keep all her kinfolk in whiskey and bullets for a year.

  The old man saw where I was looking. “Sally,” he roared. “You girl—shut that door.”

  I got up off the nail keg where I was sitting. The old man’s fierce eyes defied me to ask any more questions. “You change your mind about Fallon, come and see me,” I said.

  “Fetch his horse,” Eldredge roared to the boy. “Give him back his guns, then the rest of you walk him off the property.”

  On the way back to the road I asked the boy Willy if he’d let me buy back Fallon’s hat. “Give you a dollar for it,” I said. “Got a hole in it or I’d offer you more.”

  Willy cracked his long-jawed face in a foxy grin. “Grampaw would want for me to get more than that. It’s a nice hat. Two dollars worth of nice. Hole don’t hardly show a-tall.”

  I gave him
the two dollars and got Fallon’s hat. Out on the road I put spurs to the horse and turned back toward town. “Hey, ain’t you even going to try it on?” Willy called after me.

  Chapter Four

  The bitter taste of the Eldredge moonshine was in my mouth all the way back to Salter City. It was getting dark when I got there and, not being Saturday night, the town was quiet. The brightest light belonged to the town’s only saloon; the saloon was quiet too. The old feller who ran the restaurant had hung out the Closed sign, but when he saw it was me, he unbolted the door.

  “Wouldn’t do it for nobody but you, Sheriff,” he told me.

  He thought that entitled him to ask questions. In a one-horse town with one restaurant you learn not to set the cook against you. I turned the questions aside and told him to fry a steak and charge it to Luke.

  While the steak was cooking I got confidential; the cook liked that. I jerked my head toward the street. “Anything interesting happen while I been gone?” I asked him. There was no need to explain my meaning; the whole town was buzzing about Fallon and his interest in the Eldredges.

  The door was bolted and the place was empty except for us, but the cook looked around and lowered his voice when he spoke. “One of them fellers came over to get food about the time you rode out. You’d think he was in some big city, the way he bitched about my cooking. I guess they ate it, though, because he was over here a while ago for more.”

  I started to eat my steak. “Then they’re still at the hotel?” I said.

  “One of them rode out about an hour after you left,” the cook said. “Took the north road and was in an awful hurry. Where do you figure he went to?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. The reason Fallon was in town was still a puzzle, but now I had one or two of the pieces. Somehow Fallon and the girl called Sally were tied in together. It made no sense for Fallon to be interested in any other Eldredge. It had to be the girl. It was just as plain that Sally Eldredge hadn’t always lived near Salter City. Whatever it was, it was important enough to bring Malachi Fallon all the way to the badlands of south Texas.