Hart the Regulator 9 Page 3

  Both men had badges pinned to their vests.

  Hart released his breath slowly and eased his hand clear of his pistol, stretching it on top of the bar, fingers spread wide.

  ‘Clean him, Lefty,’ ordered the man with the stick.

  The deputy lowered the hammers of the shotgun and held it in one hand while he used the other to pull Hart’s gun from its holster, glance admiringly at the engraved handle, and tuck it down into the top of his pants.

  ‘That all?’

  Lefty felt Hart over with his free hand, failing to find the double-bladed knife that was pushed down in an Apache sheath inside his right boot.

  ‘Turn around,’ said the sheriff and Hart did as he was told, setting his back against the edge of the counter and watching as the lawman limped into the center of the saloon.

  Noises in the street told those inside that the news had already begun to spread and the usual collection of drunks and small boys and stray dogs would be on hand to watch what went down.

  Those already inside the saloon edged away from any possible lines of fire, silent save for the excited scrape of their breathing, the rasp of their chairs across the uneven boards of the floor. The bartender shifted from one leg to the other nervously, worried about his glasses and stock, to say nothing of the new painted mirror shipped from St Louis.

  Hart watched and waited, sensing that the sheriff was sizing him up, taking his time, enjoying his moment.

  ‘Fancy gun,’ commented the deputy.

  Hart ignored him, watching the sheriff instead.

  ‘How d’you feel ’bout walkin’ down to the jail?’ the lawman asked finally.

  Hart stared at him for several seconds before answering. ‘I got any choice?’

  The sheriff almost smiled. ‘Not a deal.’

  Hart set his head to one side and nodded. ‘You sure ’bout this?’

  ‘Meanin’ what?’

  ‘You ain’t confused me with someone else?’

  ‘Why the hell should we do that?’ asked the deputy with more than a trace of anger.

  The sheriff shot him a quick glance that shut him up quicker than a jack rabbit bolting down his hole.

  ‘I mean, you ain’t arrestin’ me or nothin’, are you?’ Hart asked.

  ‘Any reason we should?’

  ‘You mean you just bust in here flashin’ guns that way for some kind of fun?’

  The sheriff frowned, shifted his hold of the walnut stick. ‘Don’t get fresh with your lip!’

  Hart held his tongue; there wasn’t any sense to riling the man more than was necessary. Not without reason. It wasn’t the first time some diligent peace officer had taken it into his head to remove his gun from him and breath a sight more easy. Quite a few had tried and some had even succeeded. The feller with the walnut stick was one of them and that gave him cause for a little respect in Hart’s eyes anyway.

  ‘I ain’t arrestin’ you,’ the sheriff said, ‘not yet anyways. We go down the office there’s more time to check through them fliers as keep comin’ by. Man can’t hold ’em all to mind. You understand that?’

  ‘Sure can.’

  ‘You ever wear a badge?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Like hell he did!’ put in the deputy.

  ‘One of these times you open that mouth of yours too soon,’ snapped the sheriff, ‘you’re gonna trip your foot in it an’ finish up swallowin’ your ass!’

  The deputy smarted and shuffled his feet, looking away. Hart and the sheriff shared a laugh.

  ‘When was this?’ the lawman asked, the smile still on his face. ‘The badge.’

  ‘Few years back, over in Indian Territory. Rode as deputy US marshal for a time. Didn’t take to it much.’

  The sheriff thought a while. ‘You’d be workin’ with Fagan then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Tough old bastard.’ The sheriff laughed shortly and shook his head. ‘Rode with him once ten or more years back. Posse chasin’ after three fellers who held up the Overland stage, stole the mails, bust open the strongbox, shot an’ killed the driver and the guard. We hounded them bastards best part of a week an’ never come close enough to smell ’em. Fagan drove us hard as any man could, though.’ He tapped his stick on the ground. ‘That was before I stopped this.’

  The deputy cleared his throat, aimed for the nearest spittoon and missed by a good six inches. Hart wondered if his gunplay was as accurate. The sheriff was through with reminiscing. He nodded towards the door and Hart headed towards it, walking slow so’s not to give the deputy a chance to cut loose with his scattergun.

  ~*~

  It took the best part of half an hour to run through the bundles of wanted notices that had accumulated in the desk drawers of the sheriff’s office and none of them showed Hart to have a price on his head. He sat on a hard chair patient enough, swapping a few yarns with the lawman whenever a face or a name set some memory stalking.

  He found out the sheriff’s name was Herb Mosley and he’d been wearing one badge or other for the best part of twenty years. A couple of slugs from a Winchester had slowed him down some, left him with a stiff leg that played merry hell whenever it rained and made the sweat bust out if there was a storm. He’d taken on Zed Rawlings as deputy and while he’d never got to like him and didn’t altogether trust his judgment, nobody better had come along.

  Mosley said this while the deputy was out at the nearest saloon fetching a couple of beers. A look passed between the sheriff and Hart when he talked about not finding anybody better, just quick, no big thing, but enough for the question to be asked and answered and for the sheriff to shrug, as much to say he didn’t altogether blame him.

  They were half-way down the glass of beer when Hart leaned forward and asked to look at a poster one more time.

  The drawing was kind of sketchy and the eyes weren’t exactly right, yet …

  ‘Know him?’ asked the sheriff, getting to his feet and using his stick to hobble round behind Hart’s chair.

  ‘Could be.’ Hart looked at the flier again, turning it this way and that, still not quite certain. ‘Only he weren’t callin’ himself this, not Barlow. Feller I’m thinkin’ of went under the name of Bennett.’

  ‘That don’t mean a thing.”

  ‘I know it.”

  ‘Man can change his name quicker’n his pants.’

  ‘Specially if he’s got reason enough.’

  Mosley lifted the poster away from Hart and held it closer to his face so that he could read the print. He pronounced the words as he read them as if reading wasn’t an activity he was well practiced in.

  ‘Wanted for armed robbery and murder. Together with High-Hat Thomas and Cherokee Dave Speedmore and three others unknown, on the fourteenth day of July, 1880, Henry George Barlow held up the Egan County Branch of the Nevada Mining Company Bank at Ely. Eight hundred dollars were stolen, one clerk beaten and seriously wounded and the manager shot and killed. Reward of three hundred dollars paid by the Nevada Mining Company Bank for the capture of Barlow. One tenth reward in addition from any money returned.’

  Mosley slipped the paper back down to Hart and fetched his beer off the corner of the desk.

  ‘Where d’you run across him? This Bennett?’

  ‘Ridin’ over Shoshone way, takin’ the trail off of Railroad Pass out of Austin. He was ridin’ with a rancher name of Cantrell. Me an’ Cantrell we’d played a little cards together. He was lookin’ to hire on a top hand. Asked me but I weren’t interested.’

  ‘You reckon this Bennett was fixin’ to take the job?’

  ‘Could be. Neither of ’em said. They was ridin’ together, though. No doubt of that.’

  The sheriff took some papers from his desk, a sack of tobacco from his vest pocket, and started, methodically, to roll himself a cigarette. ‘What kind of a feller he strike you as bein’?’

  ‘Quick-tempered son-of-a-bitch. Did his damndest to rile me into a fight.’

  ‘No reason?’

 
‘No. Never saw him before him an’ Cantrell come ridin’ up when I was breakin’ camp.’

  ‘He never figured you for a lawman or such?’

  ‘That I don’t know. I sure never give him no reason to think so.’

  Mosley succeeded in lighting his cigarette at the second attempt. He lifted his stiff leg onto the edge of the desk with more difficulty than that, raked back his chair and sat enjoying his smoke for a while, leaving Hart to his own thoughts. The deputy came into the office from feeding the two prisoners locked in the cells, glanced round the silent room, lifted his shotgun down from the rack of the wall and went out.

  With the sound of the door still echoing, Mosley said: ‘Three hundred dollars ain’t a bad pot of money for bringin’ in one man.’

  Hart just nodded, waiting.

  ‘You pretty flush right now?’

  ‘Bought some shirts an’ a shave this morning’ and I’m all but cleaned out.’

  A smile settled on the sheriffs lined face. ‘Well, now, ain’t that somethin’.’

  ‘You got jurisdiction over in Egan County?’

  ‘I can get it.’

  Hart nodded, easing himself out of the chair and standing close in front of the sheriff’s broad desk. ‘That deputy of yours, we don’t—’

  ‘Hell, no! He can stay an’ look after the town. Sides, havin’ him along’d only spoil the fun.’

  Herb Mosley grinned and Hart kind of smiled and when they rode out of Virginia City at first light there were still two envelopes waiting for Hart back of the counter at the post office.

  Chapter Four

  Lydia MacPhail was forty-seven years old and weighed close on two hundred pounds. Her hair was brittle gray and so tightly curled that it gave the impression that a brisk stroke with a comb would chip pieces of it away. She tended to wear long, loose dresses in severe colors, usually modified by a faint pattern of checks or diagonal lines. These, like most things she bought, were brought direct to her door by a freight company working out of San Francisco. Some of her dresses originated in England, a good deal of her lingerie came from France. From time to time an outburst of extravagance overtook her and in this way she had acquired a number of statues of horses and dogs from Italy; all of these she had by now lost patience with and they were to be found scattered about the gardens that surrounded the house overlooking ridge after ridge of pines and cedars. She had also bought gilt mirrors which were now fixed to the four walls of her drawing room and which she liked to think (at those certain times when teasing herself in such a way was welcome) had spent the earlier years of their life in a New Orleans whorehouse.

  MacPhail was the name she had taken when she had married her third husband, the one she chose to keep. She kept it, not because she remembered him (when she remembered him at all) with any particular fondness, but because it was also the name of her only son, Robert.

  She had married first when little more than a girl and the rancher who came night after night to sit rocking on her father’s porch astonished both of her parents by pausing late in the evening in the act of untying his horse from the hitching rail and asking if he could marry their daughter, Lydia. They were as surprised as they were partly because the rancher was almost the same age as themselves, partly as in all his visits he never seemed to have paid Lydia any attention. It was true that he’d not exchanged more than a couple of dozen words with her, but he had looked. Not long, not often, but enough. Lydia was not so much a girl that she had failed to understand the meaning of those passing, shifting glances of appraisal. When her startled parents went into the room where she was feigning sleep and informed her of the rancher’s offer she was unable even to pretend surprise.

  Her mother was of the opinion that Lydia should accept marriage as soon as any man of substance offered it, and the rancher was certainly that. Her father, though, soft of heart as fathers often are about their only daughter, had always argued that Lydia should make her own choice and marry for love. But Lydia knew she was not the kind of girl that most men considered pretty and sensed that the older she got the more this would be the case. She looked at the silhouette of the farmer pacing up and down alongside his patient horse, seeing him through the screen door illuminated for moments at a time by the fireflies that darted through the close night. She saw him and saw a way out of northern Montana.

  Her father’s surprise was compounded by her ready acceptance, her mother was delighted. The wedding had scarcely been consummated (with little pleasure for Lydia, yet little pain) when her husband was badly gored by a longhorn bull and spent five agonized weeks while the wound in his groin refused to respond to treatment and the color and life gradually drained out of him.

  Lydia nursed him efficiently and well, almost lovingly, and she was at his bedside when he wrote his will in weak, sprawling letters and left the ranch and its stock to her alone.

  At the funeral she set up conversation with a banker who was a friend of her father’s and inside another month the ranch had been sold to an absentee landlord who lived in Edinburgh and Lydia was on her way from Montana to California and her vision through the screen door proved finally correct.

  She stayed aloof from men for the next few years, investing her money in land and a small shipping line and setting up a dress shop in the fashionable area of San Francisco which was so successful she soon owned two others which were managed by independently minded women like herself.

  Lydia met Gerald MacPherson at a dinner party on Nob Hill, the weight of the silver on the table enough to sink one of her ships on its way south to the Cape. He was fresh from Scotland and inevitably the sale of her ranch was mentioned, and from then on MacPherson monopolized her completely. Not only that evening, but many others. He was seven years younger than her, handsome in a pretty and vacant sort of way, his manners were good and Lydia’s inquiries into his finances showed that his family had given him a more than generous allowance to get him away from a scandal involving one of their servants.

  He asked her early one morning, after they had danced close to exhaustion, if she would allow him to stay for what remained of the night in her bed. She patted his hand and told him that such things were allowable with serving girls but not with ladies. Gerald gave in and asked her to marry him. Lydia pretended to think about it for three days and then agreed. She took Gerald to her on their wedding night with a voraciousness that he never quite got over and which never was to be repeated.

  After less than a year of marriage, gold fever struck and Gerald went into the city and bought an eighteen-inch-diameter gold pan, a pick and a long-pointed shovel, a crevice knife, a bucket, a magnet for removing black sand and a hand-pick and tweezers for tiny grains. He added a number of stoppered storage bottles and a set of scales, which the storekeeper suggested might be a touch optimistic.

  He bought cooking utensils and a variety of foodstuffs, a pair of huge canvas water containers and a crate of imported Scottish whisky, packed everything on a train of three mules, saddled up one of the thoroughbred horses Lydia and he had been raising on a ranch to the south of San Francisco, and set out alone for the hills.

  Himself and hundred upon hundred of others.

  Gerald skirted north of Gold Run and Dutch Flat on the Bear river and headed through Rough and Ready, where his mules cost him two dollars at the toll house and his horse a quarter. He made slow, careful progress up along the Pleasant Valley road and across the South Yuba river, stopping and doing as much prospecting as he considered each site deserved. Every night, just when the fire was fading and the whisky felt good in his stomach and on the back of his throat, he wrote to Lydia and mailed the letters in batches whenever he arrived at the next settlement. Some arrived, while others didn’t, and she read them with a certain cursory interest before fastening them with black ribbon and placing them in an otherwise empty drawer.

  After two months away from home, his whisky all but gone and his hands and feet raw to the point of bleeding, Gerald smashed his pick against a shelf
of rock in sublime anger and found himself staring at a line of solid gold more than three inches thick.

  He was off in the wooded hills below Feather Falls and he rode his sagging horse through the night in order to file his claim. When he arrived home a month later, the mine was being worked eighteen hours a day by three hired Chinamen and guarded twenty-four hours a day by a Cree Indian with a head like a bull moose and a tall Norwegian who had jumped ship in order to search for gold. Lydia met him with open arms, a magnum of best French champagne and a gown of smoke-gray silk.

  They had their house built in the Sierra foothills way above Spanish Flat. Lydia wanted it close enough to the snow line to feel the beauty of its coldness, stare at the way it covered everything in its path; close enough but not so close that they would be threatened themselves.

  As soon as the house was finished Gerald set out for the mine on one of his usual visits of inspection and arrived to catch the Norwegian and two of the Chinese appropriating a large quantity of gold for themselves. He came at them with the Webley revolver he was in the habit of keeping in his coat pocket. The Norwegian panicked and slammed the edge of a long-handled shovel into his head, lifting away several inches of scalp and removing one eye from its socket with uncanny precision. The two Chinamen took it in turns to drive a knife in and out of his fallen body.

  Lydia paid excessively to have her husband’s body freighted back down to the house and buried close to the roots of his favorite Black Oak. Less than two weeks later the Chinese fell into a bitter quarrel in an opium house and killed each other. The Norwegian gambled away half of what he had stolen, drank and whored away most of the rest. When what remained was stolen from him in a drunken stupor on the waterfront, he signed on for a ship bound for Cuba. Passing Tierra del Fuego in a fierce storm he was swept overboard and presumed drowned.

  By the time that happened Lydia had fallen in love for the first time. Like many women to whom this happens relatively late in life, she was all but irresistible in her passion. Jordan MacPhail married her more or less under threat. Fortunately. Lydia had sufficient of a sixth sense to ensure that there was no way he could get his hands on most of her money.