Ralph Compton My Brother, My Killer, page 1
BERKLEY
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Copyright © 2022 by The Estate of Ralph Compton
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Ebook ISBN: 9780593334140
First Edition: June 2022
Book design by George Towne, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Immortal Cowboy
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
About the Authors
THE IMMORTAL COWBOY
This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.
True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.
In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?
It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.
It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.
—Ralph Compton
CHAPTER ONE
Jake Wilkinson strained to see over the heads of the miners crowded into the saloon for a Saturday-night revel. A quick hop carried him up enough to catch sight of his quarry at the back of the room. He ducked down to let the shoulder-to-shoulder crush of men hide him as he made his way to the side of the room. A billow of smoke from cigars and the half-dozen coal oil lamps dangling around the room obscured his vision. Rather than wait for the smoke to part, he pressed into the wall and followed it toward the rear. As he moved, he slid his six-shooter from its well-oiled hard leather holster. The heavy iron filled his fist and gave him a sense that everything would go right for a change. It had been a hellacious six weeks, and he wanted nothing more than for the sorry story to come to an end.
A successful end was so close he could taste it.
Collier waved his arms around like his namesake getting ready to fly as he got into bragging on how he had bedded every last woman in Central City, and they all demanded more of him. Jake had heard the man’s lies before. All of them. Collier wasn’t the most inventive tall tale spinner around.
He was just the most vicious.
“She shoulda paid me!” Collier shouted to be heard over the din. He half turned so the left side of his face was angled toward Jake. There wasn’t much chance Collier saw even a glimpse. His left eye socket was hidden by a gaudy fox fur patch.
How he had lost his left eye was a matter of some debate. Either he didn’t remember, having been knee-walking drunk when somebody plucked it out or he had lost it in some prosaic way not worthy of retelling. It didn’t matter to Jake. His thumb drew back the hammer. The metallic click disappeared in the boisterous singing and general carousing. There was no way any human being could have heard the sound.
But somehow, Eagle Eye did. He bent double just as Jake fired. The slug tore past his shiny pate and smashed into the wall at the rear of the saloon. With a move more like a rattler than an eagle, Collier twisted agilely, drew and fired.
He missed, too. Or, Jake corrected, he missed his target. The bullet tore a thread or two from Jake’s brown canvas duster—and then it buried itself in an unfortunate miner who chanced to stand beside Jake. The grizzled prospector had shifted at the wrong time and caught the bullet in the gut. Whether his luck at finding blue dirt was good or bad, all his luck ended that night. The miner stood a little straighter, grunted, looked down in surprise at his chest where a red tide gushed like a fountain, then toppled to the sawdust-covered floor without making another sound. His beer sloshed onto Jake and distracted him enough to ruin any chance for a second, more accurate, shot at Collier.
Until this instant the exchange had been orderly enough. That changed in an instant. Collier saw who had tried to gun him down and fanned out the rest of the rounds in his six-gun. The wild spray sent a shock wave through the bar patrons. Yelling, screaming, they shoved and fought to get outside away from the gunplay. More than one of them reached for his own shooting iron and began waving it around. The barkeep added to the cacophony by discharging both barrels of a shotgun into the ceiling and yelling for everyone to stay put until they paid for their drinks.
This created a stampede to rival any buffalo herd thundering away from hunters.
Jake was knocked back by the panicked crowd, tried to keep his balance and finally braced himself against the wall to keep from being swept away. Trying to get another shot at Eagle Eye Collier proved impossible for the crush of innocent bodies. Fighting against the tide of terror-stricken drunks proved futile. Jake tried to move anyway and was slammed back a second time. He slid down to sit on the floor as everyone rushed about around him like chickens with their heads cut off. He took the opportunity to reload.
When he again carried six live rounds in his pistol, he forced his way up and weaved through the now-thinning crowd. A quick glance at the miner Collier had drilled caused a catch to come to his throat. He knew the man. Tommy Stewart had given him shelter last winter when an early storm blew down off the Rockies. Jake had been out on the circuit serving process and had been caught by the early snow and high winds that otherwise would have left him frozen until spring thaw. He had liked the miner for more than his kindness. There had been a boisterous good humor and optimistic outlook that had brought him to a decent mine a few miles outside Black Hawk.
What Stewart had been doing in Central City away from his claim and the nearer Black Hawk saloons wasn’t something Jake had time to figure out. Long strides took him to the rear of the saloon.
He stared at the two planks Collier had kicked from the wall to escape into the night. He was bigger than Collier, stockier and not as nimble. Leaning his weight against a third plank, Jake knocked it free and chanced a quick look outside.
He expected hot lead. He got a chill breeze. Sucking in his breath, he squeezed through the wall and looked around. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the starlight. While the flickering kerosene lamps in the saloon weren’t too bright, it ruined his night vision for a few seconds.
Jake dropped to one knee and studied the ground. There was such a jumble of tracks, he wondered if the alley carried more traffic, both on horse and on foot, than the main street. The town marshal slacked off in his job of removing dead animal carcasses from the larger street, forcing riders and others on foot to use this alleyway if they chose to avoid the decaying bodies and other filth that accumulated on their front steps.
“Where’d you go? You mangy, murdering cayuse!” His angry words were swallowed by the hubbub out in the main street and from the shouts of the few customers still blundering about inside the saloon. He stood and looked around. He had to guess where Collier had fled. A grim smile came to his lips as the words came out in a hoarse whisper. “The livery stables. That’s where you’re headed.”
“Bet you double or nothing on that,” came a bass, mocking drawl.
Jake swung around. Wedged into the hole in the saloon wall, blocking the light from inside, a burly man dressed in buckskins held a six-shooter in his hand. It wasn’t aimed directly at Jake, but only a slight shift would change that.
“I don’t need your opinion, Bronson.” Jake centered his gun on the man’s chest. It took all his willpower not to squeeze off a round.
“That’s one whopper you’re telling yourself, Wilkinson, but then you always were a consarned liar. Always talking to yourself since you’re the only one who’d believe such barefaced, dirty lies like you spin. My help is exactly what you need right now since Collier’s come back to town.”
The tone warned Jake that Bronco Bronson was goading him into making a mistake. Trying to shoot the bounty hunter in the dark just to get him out of his hair would be such a slipup. How Bronson thought he had the upper hand in such a shootout wasn’t anything Jake intended to explore at the moment. Henry Collier was hightailing it out of town by now.
“The stable,” Jake said, louder. “He needs a horse.”
“Of course he does,” Bronson said mockingly. “But if you head for the livery, he’s riding off in the other direction.”
“Sadie’s cathouse,” Jake said. His eyes narrowed. It made sense that Collier had left his horse there. He and Sadie Z were thicker than thieves.
Jake snorted. Both of them were thieves, only Sadie plied her thievery in the bedroom while Collier and his two brothers robbed banks and gunned down innocent citizens for the stark pleasure of seeing someone die.
“Ah, a worthy thought pops into that pea brain of yours,” Bronson said. “How lonely it must be. Are you sure you don’t want me feedin’ some more clever ideas through your ear so you can actually catch Collier?”
“There’s no reason for you to help me arrest him. The reward would go begging.”
“It might be I’m angling to get a finder’s fee if I help the Gilpin County sheriff find these miscreants. You like that word? It rolls right on off the tongue.” He stuck his tongue out and made a rude noise. “I read it in the Gazette.”
“What were you doing in Colorado Springs?” Jake hated himself for letting the question slip out like this. Getting into any discussion with Bronson let Collier put an extra mile or two between them, yet he knew the bounty hunter had purposefully mentioned it.
“I was hunting for the rest of the Collier gang, of course. Ben and that good-for-nothing brother of theirs, Pete, stopped to take the waters in the shadow of the magnificent Pikes Peak.”
“You read the Springs’ newspaper, but you’re on the west side of the Rockies. Did they give you the slip?”
“I want all three of them. Collect every penny of the reward. You know me, Sheriff, I never do things by half measures.” Bronson laughed until he shook. The buckskin fringe swayed in the light from inside the saloon, casting oddly dancing shadows into the alley. He settled down and made another rude sound intended to get Jake’s goat.
“So you want him to give me the slip. That means you don’t know where all three of them’re camped. You want Eagle Eye to get back to his brothers so it’ll be easier for you to make a clean sweep of the gang.”
“It might be, yes, sir, Sheriff Wilkinson, that might be true. But the truth of the matter is that I already found where Ben and Pete pitched camp but Henry, now, Henry wasn’t with them. He came to town on his own business.”
“Sadie’s, eh?” Jake turned to head for the whorehouse situated on the northern edge of town. From the corner of his eye he saw how Bronson reacted. “I may not get to collect that reward if I track Eagle Eye to where him and his brothers are camped, but the citizens of this fine county will remember my name as the one who brought the Collier gang to justice.”
“That kind of law keeping and publicity can get a sheriff reelected,” Bronson agreed cheerfully. “You’ll need every bit of good press that you can get after the debacle during the bank robbery.”
Jake’s temper flared. If he couldn’t gun down the bounty hunter, a few choice whacks with a pistol barrel alongside the head might give him the same satisfaction. He despised the man on general principles, but this comment went too far. He ground his teeth together and stormed off, turning the corner of the saloon and waiting a few seconds to cool down. When he chanced a quick peek back into the alleyway, Bronson had disappeared from the hole in the wall, retreating into the saloon. Jake wasted no time rushing in the direction of the livery stable. The bounty hunter had tried to send him on a wild-goose chase to the brothel in the opposite direction.
Sadie Z might harbor a low-life crook like Henry Collier, but there wasn’t enough profit in it for her to do it too often. Jake knew to the dime how much the Colliers had stolen from the Black Hawk bank. The total take was hardly enough to put a glint in Sadie’s eye. And somehow he couldn’t see Sadie and any of the Collier gang becoming attached for longer than an amorous paid-for hour or two.
Head down, Jake ran for all he was worth toward the livery stable. Collier had quite a head start on him, and the protracted palavering with Bronson had been foolish. The bounty hunter wasn’t able to keep up on foot. During his working days as a bronco buster for the Lazy H just outside Greeley, he had been thrown and the horse he was trying to break had stepped on his leg. Or maybe the bronco had slammed into a post and broken the cowboy’s leg that way. Every time Bronson told the story, the details changed. For all Jake knew, a drunken Bronson had fallen out of his bunk and wrecked the leg. But what he did know, was that Bronson never walked right after that.
Unable to ride with the Lazy H crew because of his injury, Bronson had taken up the mantle of a law-abiding, justice-serving bounty hunter. Jake wasn’t having any of it. Bronco Bronson caught enough outlaws, true, but Jake suspected him of stealing the crooks’ loot and keeping it. More than once he had brought in a stagecoach robber who wailed about the bounty hunter robbing him. Once or twice, considering the quality of the owlhoots inclined to break the law, meant nothing. A steady stream of flowing complaints over the years made Jake wary.
The Colliers had held up the bank and made off with a tad more than five hundred dollars in gold coin and greenbacks. If they’d had any sense, they’d have made off with five times that much when the big corporations stashed their payrolls for the hard rock miners at the end of the month. Still, that five hundred plus as much more riding on the outlaws’ heads made a tidy payday for any bounty hunter. It was especially sweet if Bronson delivered the gang fast. A thousand dollars for a few weeks’ work was far more than the thirty dollars a month Bronson had earned from the Lazy H getting his teeth chipped from clinging to unbroken, hard-bucking mustangs.
Jake slowed when he saw the livery stable’s freshly painted sign swaying gently in the night breeze. He stepped onto the boardwalk across the street and carefully watched for any movement. Bronson had tried to decoy him away. The bounty hunter might be on his way here, too, but his gimpy leg would slow him down. Jake worried more about Henry Collier bursting out and galloping away.
“If I’m right, that snake in the grass is already here,” he said, his lips hardly moving. Jake ground his teeth together to silence himself. Talking to himself was a habit started when he was a young sprout and one he continued because of being alone on the trail so often. An errant word now would give him away to one of the most dangerous men he’d ever tried to bring to justice. The way Collier had reacted in the saloon to the sound of a hammer cocking warned him the man’s hearing was as good as any deer and a sight better than most humans.
He pulled his duster around to cover the badge pinned to his coat lapel. A single glint off that shiny badge would warn a man calling himself Eagle Eye, even if he had only one eye, as surely as a careless sound. Jake had seen Collier escape some deadly traps primarily because he paid extra attention to everything. Making up for the missing eye had turned Henry Collier into a formidable enemy.
After a few minutes, Jake crossed the street. He pulled his smoke wagon and rested his thumb on the hammer. Pressed against the stable wall, he listened hard. A few horses stirred in the corral out back. Another horse stabled inside kicked at its stall. Then he heard a sulfurous curse from someone moving about in the dark.
