Hart the Regulator 3 Read online

  Evie was in the room now, sitting in a chair next to the bed working on her sampler. The words, Home is Where the H ... stood out in scarlet thread, while Evie worked to finish the last words in time to send it to her mother for her birthday.

  Earlier, she’d chattered away to Hart about how she’d left home in Kansas and hoped to make a career for herself on the stage. How she’d gotten a job singing in a chorus line of six other girls on a tour of the middle-west. The six had become four. In Omaha the manager had absconded with what little takings existed and left the troupe stranded. They’d tried to carry on by themselves, but inside a month the line consisted of Evie. Solo can-can wasn’t a big draw - not big enough to pay a girl’s expenses. She’d been sitting on her upended trunk outside a stage station when she’d met Kate. Since then she hadn’t looked back, she hadn’t gone hungry and she’d sent her mother little presents from time to time accompanied by notes telling her how well she was doing and that now she was playing juvenile leads in musical comedy.

  Now she sat there with her own thoughts, working the sampler painstakingly, small dark eyes flicking along the path of the needle.

  Hart eased his back into the deep pillows and tried not to think of anything other than what he was going to do when he gotten out of there and was able to climb into the saddle again. He wasn’t always successful; other thoughts interceded. Images confused him - what had been his home until as a young kid he up and quit - what might have been his home except that the woman he’d planned to share it with?

  ‘Wes. How’re you feeling?’

  Kate stepped inside, balancing a tray on the flat of her hand. T brought you some soup. You’ve got to keep up your strength you know.’

  Hart nodded and mumbled something and Kate glanced quickly at Evie, her larger darker eyes holding the girl’s for a few seconds before dismissing her. Evie looked down at her sampler, then stood up.

  ‘’Bye, Wes. I’ll be sure to come in and see you again.’

  She smiled briefly and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. Kate sat down next to the head of the bed and set the tray on Hart’s lap. The soup was thick and smelled of beef, steam rising from it; several pieces of bread were laid alongside.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Feelin’ I’ve been here too long,’

  ‘It’s hardly any time at all.’

  He looked at her. ‘There’s things to do.’

  Kate opened her mouth, a sight of her pale tongue between white, even teeth. She held on to the words, knowing it would be useless to say them, worse than useless. Not even sure if they were things she wanted to say because they were meant or because she somehow reckoned she ought to say them.

  ‘How’s your soup?’ she asked after a while.

  Hart nodded, mouth full, looking at her again. Her dark hair was pulled back tight. She was wearing a black dress that fitted her body close. Round, silver earrings hung alongside her fine-boned face. A thin silver bracelet circled her left wrist; a small cameo ring on the second finger of the left hand. Around her neck, between the rise of her breasts, hung a silver heart-shaped locket.

  Hart banged the spoon against the side of the bowl, dropped it back down. ‘Tomorrow. I’m leavin’ tomorrow. First light.’

  ‘You’re not …’ She caught herself, stopped.

  ‘Get Charlie to see to my horse. Pick me up some supplies, Okay?’

  Kate nodded, taking the tray from his lap.

  ‘I think I might be movin’ on myself soon.’

  Hart looked surprised. ‘How come?’

  She set her head a little to one side. ‘I get restless. Besides, some of the decent folk around town aren’t very happy with this place any longer.’ She pronounced decent as if it were a very dirty word.

  ‘Why the hell not? It’s clean, well run, successful.’

  Kate stood up. ‘Exactly.’

  She bent down to lift the tray and her face came close to his. Just for a moment. Then she was moving towards the door.

  At the doorway she turned her head. ‘If you’re going tomorrow you’d best get all the rest you can.’ She paused, looking at him. ‘If you’re leaving that early I probably won’t see you. Good luck, Wes.’

  He thought she added something else that might have been, ‘Take care’, but by then the door was closing and the words were muffled. Hart leaned back and closed his eyes.

  The river gorge struck through the mountains, a flash of blue reflecting here and there from the sinuous line of water. Down on either side of the river patches of bright grass alternated with sandy mud. The cliffs to the east were bare of vegetation, crumbled and broken surfaces of grey and brown and the occasional red. At the other side of the valley the slope was more gradual; shades of green merged into hazy blue at the top. Pines stood alone or in small clumps; there were patches of dark scrub lower down and above midway, where the ground leveled out for a spell, the yellow tops of aspens moved in the wind.

  Hart straightened the brim of his hat and spoke softly to the grey, which went into a walk, picking her path with care. The wind was strong, keen at that height. He had unrolled his Indian wearing blanket from behind his saddle and slipped it over his right shoulder so that it hung diagonally across his body and was knotted below his left hip. The blanket was woven from hand-spun dark blue, red and white wool yarns, striped with a row of star shaped patterns along the center and at the edges.

  Hart had been carrying the blanket for some ten years, ever since it had been presented to him by a Navajo chief at the time he’d been working as an Indian scout for the army.

  The double-edged knife which hung from his saddle pommel was in an Apache sheath which had been given to him a couple of years earlier, before he’d moved north.

  He had another weapon which went further back, which came from another time he recalled with mixed feelings. In the right side saddlebag was a Starr double-action .44 pistol he’d taken from a Union soldier during the Civil War. The time he’d been riding under the colors of General Henry Hopkins Sibley on the General’s rampaging expedition through Albuquerque and Santa Fe. That had been before their luck had changed; before the superior strength of Union arms and men had beaten them back, broken them - broken some of them.

  The grey pulled up and tossed its head. A mule deer, its coat changing from blue-grey to reddish-brown, stood on a ledge thirty yards off, staring at man and rider. Its large, leaf-shaped ears were raised in front of high arching antlers, eyes oval and dark and bright.

  Hart clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth to set the horse in motion again and at the sound the deer turned fast and ran along the uneven rock, its black-tipped tail showing clearly against the white rump.

  Within seconds it had disappeared from sight. Hart smiled to himself and started to whistle a fragment of a tune he’d heard once down on the Mexican border. When they rounded the next bend he stopped abruptly. There it was laid out below: Tago.

  The town was at the end of the gorge, before the mountains closed in and shut off everything but the river. The buildings were mostly clustered in a rough circle on the western bank, though a few straggling places had appeared on the other side. From that distance it was impossible to pick out features, shapes, enough to see that it was growing into a town of fair size.

  Above Tago the trees had been cleared for a width of maybe five hundred yards and set into the middle of that bare patch were mine workings. Smoke spiraled up towards the cold blue of the sky in a lazy movement that seemed almost frozen in time. As Hart got nearer he could pick out other, smaller workings, wooden props around openings in the rock, wooden shacks, wagons. More smoke came from along the eastern ledge.

  Silver, thought Hart. Silver.

  His face set in a grimace, his eyes narrowing and the line of his mouth fine and tight. He’d seen mining towns before, worked them. Something about the craze for instant riches burned its way into everyone’s blood, even the ones that weren’t themselves up there digg
ing, blasting, sifting.

  The buildings took on shape, color. Round the outskirts a succession of grey tents flapped in the wind, strong enough even at the foot of the valley. Single-story shacks gave way to taller, more substantial buildings. The mud-caked, dry street led into a square: the Silver Star Saloon, long and painted silver and blue across its front, a balcony above; the Tago Mining Company Assay Office, Mason Beaumont, Proprietor, in smaller letters beneath its main sign; Bank of Tago, Mason Beaumont, Prop.; Beaumont Dry Goods and Suttlers ...

  Hart stopped looking - he’d seen enough.

  He rode over towards the saloon and slipped to the ground, looping the reins over the hitching rail between six or seven other horses already there. On the boardwalk he slowly turned full circle. Faces stared at him from other points of the square. From the window of the store, from the doorway of the bank, from the upstairs of the assayers. A loose board above made him glance up at the balcony. A woman with bright red hair and wearing a green robe with feathers stitched to the hem, looked back down at him without interest.

  Hart flicked the safety thong clear of the hammer of his Colt and pushed through the bat-wing doors and into the saloon. Maybe a dozen people inside stopped what they were doing and turned to face him. Hart hesitated a moment, letting them see what they wanted to see, then moved over to the bar. Grease and dust were thick on the counter. The man who came slowly to serve him was unshaven and bleary-eyed; the apron tied above his waist was ringed with dark stains. He wiped the back of one hand over his mouth before speaking.

  ‘What you drinkin’?’

  ‘Beer.’

  ‘Okay.’ The barkeep poured a glass of yellowy liquid with an inch head of foam and slopped it down on the bar.

  Hart stared at him a moment, then took a coin from his pocket and dropped it deliberately down into the wet. He lifted the glass and drank: it was as bad as it looked.

  ‘Wanna buy yourself a piece of land?’ The man who’d come up alongside Hart was short and thin, strands of wispy hair arching over his balding head. His thick plaid shirt was torn at one arm; his face disfigured by a virulent purple swelling on his right cheek.

  ‘Up on the mountain. Claim all staked out.’ He fumbled in his pocket and tried to pull clear a piece of paper. ‘’S all legal. Right. Right here,’ He finally flourished the paper, tatty at the edges, under Hart’s nose. ‘Let you have it for hundred dollars.’

  The small watering eyes looked at Hart with some vestige of hope. ‘Seventy-five, that’s as low as I’ll go. Sev ... fifty dollars, mister. You can’t do better’n that. Fifty dollars for …’

  Hart fished in his pocket and fingered out a coin, reaching forward and dropping it down into the man’s shirt pocket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You keep your mine.’

  The man bristled back. ‘Hey, mister. I ain’t beggin’, I’m sellin’. I ain’t got no need to beg. Not me. No way I need to …’

  Hart turned away and moved a few chairs out of the way getting to an unoccupied table. He sat down and leaned the chair back on to its rear legs, stretching out. As soon as he’d finished his beer he’d go off and get something to eat. Time enough to find Beaumont when he’d looked around. It didn’t seem as if Mason Beaumont was going to be too hard to find anyway - not the way he was leaving his name all over town.

  He watched as the man who’d been trying to sell him what was likely a worthless piece of paper leaned across the bar and used the coin Hart had given him to buy a drink.

  That was always the way it was. Especially in places like this.

  The doors swung open and a thickset man walked in briskly, followed by another, tall and thin and wearing a neat grey suit. The first man stopped short of the bar and jabbed a finger in the direction of the bartender. ‘Bottle of whiskey and glasses. Bring ’em over.’

  His voice was gravelly, deep. His mouth red above a full beard. Hart put him at around forty-five. Without waiting for the bartender to start obeying his order but assuming that he would, the man walked towards the back of the room. He went close by Hart without giving him a second glance.

  His companion, however, found Hart more interesting. Interesting enough to take a pair of spectacles from his pocket and set them on his nose, staring through them for some little time until his friend called him over.

  Hart stared back, unconcerned, wondering if the slight bulge underneath the left side of the man’s coat was a gun and if so whether he ever got to use it.

  ‘Lacy, you comin’?’

  His pale face having given nothing away, the thin man nodded briefly and walked slowly past Hart, glancing down at him as he passed. Not exactly at him - at the pearl-handled Colt .45 in his holster.

  Hart waited a while, then screwed his chair round so that he could see the pair at the table without setting his back towards the door. The bearded man was doing most of the talking – shouting – and the other one sat there calmly, listening, nodding, from time to time gesturing with his right hand.

  Hart wondered if the bearded one was Mason Beaumont, but somehow he wasn’t certain. It was almost as if this man was being too loud, too pushy. If you owned as much as Beaumont did then you didn’t have to shout about it. Not in a saloon like this, you didn’t.

  ‘Jesus!’ The bearded man pushed back his chair and hurled the contents of his glass across the floor. ‘What in hell’s name d’you call this mule’s piss? Whiskey?’

  Several heads turned towards him, but nobody seemed too surprised. Hart guessed they were used to such outbursts.

  ‘You!’ A hand pointed at the bartender. ‘You! I’m talkin’ to you. You hear me?’

  ‘I hear you well enough, Mr. Henry.’ The barman’s voice was weary, disinterested in the whole business.

  ‘Then do somethin’ about it. Fetch us a bottle of somethin’ decent, not this piss water!’ He got hold of the bottle and threw it with a sideways swing of the arm, sailing it over the heads of two men playing cards and smashing it against the side wall.

  The bartender sighed and brought a fresh bottle, putting it on the table with exaggerated care.

  The man with spectacles sat through this performance un-50

  perturbed, occasionally pressing the tips of his fingers together for seconds at a time. When Hart looked away he noticed that somebody else had slipped into the saloon during the episode and was standing at the end of the bar nearest to the doors.

  He was young, likely not more than twenty or so; a few inches under six foot. His brown hair was curly, cut short. His eyes brown in a roundish, handsome face. The eyes were staring past Hart at the back of the room. At the man with the grey three-piece suit and wire-framed spectacles. At Lacy.

  They were eyes brimming with hatred so strong that Hart could read it clearly from the middle of the room. There was a gun holstered at his side that looked about to carry the message. Hart watched as the younger man’s hand moved until it was only inches above the pistol butt.

  He stepped a foot away from the bar and his voice was clear and loud: ‘Lacy!’

  The way Lacy slowly turned his head in the direction of the door, Hart thought maybe he’d known the youngster was there all along. Either that, or he was cool as ice.

  ‘You killed ’em, Lacy. My brothers. Killed ’em or had ’em killed. I been waitin’ for you to come out of that place you keep stashed up in an’ show yourself. An’ now you done it.’

  He moved his head to one side and back again.

  ‘Now I’m goin’ to kill you.’

  Lacy turned his body in the chair and stared along the room. Then he carefully removed his spectacles, folded them and slipped them back down into his pocket.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Waterford.’

  He spoke quietly but in the silence that now held the saloon every word was clear.

  Dan Waterford flushed. ‘You’re a liar. You had ’em killed. Both of ’em. Shot down like they was animals, worse than that, trash.’

  ‘I still don’t know what yo
u’re talking about. I’m sorry.’ Lacy nodded his head and turned away, picking up his glass and drinking the whiskey slowly.

  Dan Waterford cursed and walked half a dozen yards into the room. Hart saw the hand curved above the gun and noticed that it was trembling from a mixture of excitement and fear. He looked into Waterford’s eyes and tried to figure out which was the strongest. He settled for the last. He doubted if Waterford had ever shot a man before; if he’d ever drawn on a man either.

  Hart remembered the bulge in Lacy’s coat and knew that the youngster was about to get himself killed if he pressed things too far.

  ‘Lacy! You cowardly, lying, bastard!’

  Someone jumped up from the table but it wasn’t Lacy.

  The bearded man’s face was red with anger, his voice louder than ever. ‘Shut that Irish mouth of yours and get the hell out of here while you can still walk!’

  ‘Henry, you keep out of this!’

  ‘Don’t you tell me what I can do, boy. I don’t need advice from the likes of you.’

  Waterford’s hand dropped closer to his gun. His face went white. ‘What’s that mean?’

  The big man unbuttoned his coat, revealing a wide gunbelt. ‘It means that if your brothers were killed like trash that’s because trash is what they was.’

  Dan Waterford’s fingers grabbed for the butt of his gun; Henry’s hand went under the flap of the coat, reaching for his own weapon. Wes Hart was faster than both of them. Before either man could clear leather, he’d sprung to his feet and his arm had moved through a blurring arc which brought the Colt out of the holster and finished with it rock steady in his hand, hammer cocked and ready. Waterford saw: hesitated.

  Hart’s eyes told him, don’t do it, don’t go through with it. Waterford sucked in the right side of his mouth and carried on pulling the gun clear. Hart jumped forward, bringing his right arm up and round. The side of the Colt’s barrel smashed against the youngster’s head and he slumped backwards, mouth open in a shout. As he rocked back against the bar, his hand dropped clear of his pistol. He leaned for a few moments against the counter, a line of blood running through his brown hair and down his cheek.