Gunsmoke Serenade Read online

  He pushed past the batwings and made for the bar. The bar was no more than some planks of wood suspended between barrels. The two men were easy to pick out. They sat at a table with a soiled dove on each side of them. The girls were giggling and one of the men had his dusty arms around a dove, his hands groping. The dove pushed him away and said, ‘Buy me a drink first! I don’t cotton easily to a man that smells worse than a horse!’

  The man backhanded the dove, the smack! echoing loudly in the small room.

  Knight said, ‘Buy her a drink and apologize to her.’

  The two men paused and focused on Knight. He watched their eyes. In his peripheral vision he was aware of where their hands were, the position of their boots on the floor, but mostly he watched their eyes. The doves looked at Knight in astonishment. One of the girls slowly stood up and backed away. She stepped lightly backwards and finally settled on a spot at the furthest end of the room.

  And their eyes picked out the US marshal’s star on his vest, the Colt slung low in its holster on his right hip, the cold, predatory look in his eyes and the steadiness of his hands. Knight was tall and weathered but gave the appearance of being strong, which he was. His dark but silver-tinged mustache curled around his lips. Assessing his age was difficult.

  The other dove, finally pushing herself away, stood up and stammered, ‘That’s all right m-mister, I … I don’t need nothin’.’ And she backed away as well to join her friend as a witness.

  Neither man spoke. They were as if suddenly frozen in place, unable to act on their own behalf. Death stood before them and the singular fact of that moment was not lost to them.

  ‘We haven’t done nothin’ wrong,’ one of the men said.

  ‘What does Silas Manchester want?’ Knight asked. The surprise registered in their faces, but both men remained silent. ‘All right,’ Knight drawled, ‘you’ll tell me now or later, it’s all the same to me.’

  He strode forward and his gun was in his hand quickly, the barrel pointed at the closest man. Knight reached down and pulled the man’s gun from its holster and stuck it in his belt. He waved his Colt at the second man, ‘Hand it to me butt first.’

  With both men disarmed he instructed them to stand and he marched them outside with their hands raised. One of the men, objecting to being treated roughly, turned and tried to ram his elbow at Knight but the marshal slammed his gun across the man’s face and pistol-whipped him to his knees.

  ‘Men like you belong under a headstone with the worms,’ Knight said. ‘Now get moving.’

  There was no further protest as the men were herded into the jail. Sheriff Dobbs, having dozed off with his feet on his desk, rubbed his whiskered jaw and cursed as Knight stomped into the office.

  ‘Two of Manchester’s men,’ Knight said. ‘You boys introduce yourselves to the sheriff.’

  Their names were Vinnie and Rick, and Rick began to protest at being struck by the marshal.

  ‘We ain’t done nothin’ wrong! You got no cause to lock us up! It ain’t right that I get whipped like that!’

  But lock them up they did, each in his own cell in the rear of the building. Knight stood in the hallway looking in at them and said, ‘When you get a notion to talk about Silas Manchester you can tell the sheriff here. Until then you’re our guests.’

  Even Sheriff Dobbs had to chuckle at that. Returning to the office Dobbs said, ‘They’ll be expecting breakfast in the morning and if I don’t serve it they should talk then.’

  ‘They’re stubborn, but they’ll talk. That silver in their pockets won’t do them any good behind bars.’

  ‘You got any idea what this is about yet?’

  ‘Nope. But I expect in the next day or so we’ll find out.’

  On his way back to his hotel Knight paused on the boardwalk. Further down the street the torches flickered weirdly and yellow light dashed across the faces of the dead men in their coffins. The street was empty but for the vacant stare of those men on their way to their graves. The sky was too dark, too unyielding. It was as if a black curtain had been drawn across the sky and the air had been sucked from the earth. Knight felt closed in. He tried to shrug the feeling off but it lingered in his mind like the memory of a serpent’s cold-blooded touch.

  Back in his hotel room he sat on the bed’s edge with his gun in his hand. How many times had he sat thus, waiting for the inevitable battle? He had lost count. His life had become an endless stream of gunfights. But he had no regrets.

  He thought about her then and he knew in the morning he would take the ride that he’d been avoiding. It wasn’t far. Just north as the crow flies. Many years ago it had been a pleasant valley bordered by mountains and forest. In the spring the birds sang in the trees and the brook was a good place to fish.

  The gun was reassuring in his hand. The gun that defined him, the gun that was as much a part of Maxfield Knight as his own soul. Old Scratch might palaver a bit over the details but he had given it all up willingly that day long ago when he lost her.

  Sleep was impossible. If he closed his eyes he was at Shiloh again because he could never leave Shiloh behind. It was always there, just as the burning of Atlanta was always with him; the stench of bodies burning on a pyre, the choking smoke, the sound of muskets volleying across the distant fields.

  He set his Colt on the bed. The maid had pulled the blankets tight. The bed was a flat unruffled expanse that offered no comfort for a man suffering from insomnia. He paced the room. Finally, he turned the oil lamp down and extinguished the flame. His eyes had adjusted to the dark. There was a faint glow coming through the window from the street below. He looked out the window and nothing had changed. The dead men stared into eternity. The flames of the torches made dancing shadows. He checked his pocket watch. 12:45 a.m.

  When dawn finally came he had dozed but a little, his mind thundering with echoes of battles long past. He heard a bird chirping outside the window. He went to the bureau and splashed water on his face from the basin. He dried his face with a small towel and strapped on his gunbelt. Picking up the Colt from the bed he holstered it and went downstairs to see about his horse.

  An hour later he had ridden north following the creek that ran south past Cherrywood Crossing. The sky was a fragile shade of turquoise, the strips of small gray clouds hanging at the horizon reminding him of the gunsmoke that hung over the peach trees at Shiloh. He had come to Cherrywood Crossing with his wife after the war but the war had followed him even to this tranquil paradise. He rode with a solitary purpose and whatever emotions he felt were long buried and his granite features revealed not a hint of turmoil.

  Across a pasture of green grass where once stood a small farmhouse and barn. Over a hill and alongside the creek and then he reined his horse to a halt. There had been something on the wind, he thought, or was it just a memory? The place was full of ghosts but perhaps he was too accustomed to their presence. It was true that there were times when the dead spoke to him with such conviction that he often failed to heed the words of the living.

  Putting the spurs to his horse, he cantered along a deer trail and passed through a copse of trees and rode into another pasture. The morning sun beat at the grass and the grass swayed mockingly in the wind. The paint on the picket fence that surrounded the lone grave was peeled away by the sun, wind and rain. The little gate swung easily open and he stood there quietly for some time with his hat in his hands without speaking. He stared dully at the stone marker’s simple words: MARTHA KNIGHT – BELOVED WIFE. Because she had died so young Knight often wondered how she might have reacted to the crow’s feet that now tugged at his eyes and the salt and pepper slant to his hair.

  There are tales of Maxfield Knight that are well known to cowhands and drifters who picked them up on cattle drives or in the saloons of faraway Dodge City, or as far south as San Antonio. Some of these tales were true; his gunfights with Jake Grimstone, Carleton Usher and his sons, and a legendary battle against Juno Eckstrom and his men at Crippled Horse. But of all t
he tales that none could verify was the story of how Maxfield Knight hunted down the men that had killed his wife while robbing the bank at Cherrywood Crossing. He had never spoken of it and none had been bold enough to ask.

  After a while Knight nodded once to the gravestone and put on his hat. Striding from the grave he looked straight ahead, his face an unreadable enigma. He mounted his horse and gently tugged at the reins. He hadn’t gone far when some innate sense warned him, but he continued on his way as if nothing was wrong. He wasn’t surprised when the rider cantered on to the trail and stopped twenty yards ahead of him. There was nothing unusual about the man, no discerning features. He looked like any cowpuncher on the trail. The man held a Winchester across his legs but gave no outward sign of hostility.

  ‘Who sent you?’ Knight asked.

  ‘It don’t matter none right now,’ the man said, ‘so you best just ride up toward the mountains.’

  ‘That’s out of my way. I’m riding back to Cherrywood Crossing.’

  ‘Not today.’

  In a flash Knight’s Colt was in his hand, the barrel pointed at the man’s chest. The click-clack of a Winchester being loaded sounded on his right. Almost immediately a horse neighed on his left. A turn of his head in both directions revealed they had him surrounded. The men on each side of him had their rifles pointed at him. The man before him remained passive.

  ‘You’ll have a chance is all I can say. You gotta go up into that tree line yonder.’

  ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘We’re giving you a chance to get on. You can see how it is. We get paid to tell you what direction to go. If you refuse we shoot you down, but we’ll make more money if you skedaddle up thataway.’

  ‘I’m a US marshal. You can’t get away with this. You boys need to give this foolishness a rest and tell me who put you up to this.’

  ‘We are being paid in gold by Mister Silas Manchester of Atlanta.’

  ‘That name doesn’t mean anything to me. He sent men into town that are dead now. You ponder that.’

  ‘What matters is that your name means something to him.’

  The man on his left fired once, the bullet striking the ground in front of Knight’s horse and kicking up dirt. The horse, startled, almost bolted but Knight reined him down and said, ‘Steady boy.’

  ‘We’ve done enough talkin’. You get the idea. Now once you cross that line of trees past the meadow out yonder we are coming to kill you. That’s your chance to get away.’

  ‘You’re hunting me?’

  ‘Get going.’

  Knight estimated his chances. Two of the three men had the better position. Instinctively he also knew there were more men out of sight. They had planned this well. And while the name of his enemy meant nothing to him, he embraced the hunt they had set before him. In the end he would know everything he needed to know about Mister Silas Manchester of Atlanta. His mouth twisted into an almost evil grin.

  ‘I’ll play your game,’ Knight said, ‘and I’ll see you boys real soon.’

  Slapping the reins, he spurred his horse into a run and made for the trees.

  TWO

  At sunrise the forests of summer are places of solitude. He had come to prefer the forests over the desert, although the desert of his youth and the town of Raven Flats would always have a special place in his heart. But a forest was something else to consider, and in his travels he had learned of the pleasures of trout fishing in a clear mountain brook. Deputy US Marshal Cole Tibbs was not a talented fisherman; not in the way the great anglers of Wyoming and Colorado were great, but he was capable. Sometimes being capable was all that a man owned.

  Before the sun had crested the horizon he was at the edge of a clear running brook, the water rushing with a sound like a song that swept past and trickled out of view as the birds high in the pines whistled a lullaby that signaled the dawn. He had cut a fishing pole with his Bowie knife using a sapling branch. The green wood was flexible enough and wouldn’t snap on him if he got tangled up. He used a store-bought hook that came from a Denver mercantile and a silk line from the same merchant. He had extra hooks and some old horsehair lines in his saddlebag. He didn’t much care about the lures manufactured in faraway places like St Louis so he relied on worms and night crawlers he dug up from the moist soil. The day before he had caught two fish. He gutted them on the bank and tossed the entrails back into the water. He didn’t want bears nosing in too close. He cooked the fish in a pan over an open fire and ate them all at once. There was nothing to match the taste of brook trout cleaned and cooked right at the edge of a cold-running stream.

  It was idle time for him and he welcomed it. In the past year he had ridden alongside marshal Knight and faced down numerous adversaries, all of which can take a toll on a man’s nerves. He had come to rely on his modest fishing expeditions as a useful way to relax and shake loose the trail dust. Some men preferred drinking in a saloon as their leisure activity, but Tibbs had limited his taste for whiskey to Christmas and his birthday.

  His self-disciplined approach to life had given him a knowledge of the world that some would never understand. He was wary, cautious without being paranoid. Even here under the sun-baked forest that appeared so tranquil he knew danger could lurk at every turn. He wore his gun on his hip. His Winchester was loaded and always nearby. He surveyed the landscape periodically, squinting into the colorful hills for signs of riders.

  On his third night he heard horses. Faint voices trailed off on the night wind. In the morning he circled his camp on foot but found nothing. He was in such a secluded spot that to find him would mean riding up to within twenty feet of him. He could see nothing looking up and down the stream because it curled off north and south of him. This was a stream that found its way by curling among the hills and trees by clawing its way south in a zig-zag pattern.

  He set into his daily fishing routine and thought nothing further of the horses he’d heard. When the sun was high over the trees its rays cut across the stream and he could see the rocks and sand and the shadows of small fish as the water rushed headlong on its way south. A mile north of his campsite he had seen some prairie chickens. Wild chickens and hens were not uncommon but perished easily because of the profusion of cougars, bears and coyotes. He set out to catch one and found himself rewarded with two fresh chicken eggs. The chicken itself he caught and snapped its neck. Armed with a new meal, he returned to camp.

  Tibbs gutted the chicken, plucked the feathers and tossed the entrails downstream. He cooked it on a spit that afternoon. The two eggs were broken into a pan and scrambled quickly with the tin fork in his saddlebag. The chicken was tasty although he wished he had some salt. He made a mental note to add salt to his war bag when he returned to Cherrywood Crossing. He ate the eggs and the chicken as the afternoon slipped into a tranquil sunset. The sky was awash with lavender and orange, burning at the horizon like a blacksmith’s forge. This was the time of day he enjoyed the most. He had the steady sound of the stream to keep him company, the call of birds and the gentle breath of a warm wind to lull him to sleep. And he reveled in the way the light in a forest is changing constantly. The textures were vibrant; the pines swaying gently, their branches whispering ancient songs, a music of the west, rugged and mysterious.

  The shadows lengthened as evening crept closer. He had decided that in the morning he would move his camp two miles north-east. There was a small lake that he found as he surveyed the area the previous week, and while he preferred river and creek fishing he thought the change of pace might get him some bigger fish. A freshwater lake with large bass and musky was quite a prospect for Tibbs. That night he watched the stars twinkling above and he wished his girl, Jamie Hart, was with him. He had been delaying any firm decision, but he reckoned at some point he would ask her to marry him. He slept soundly without a care in the world.

  In the morning his horse was restless. The horse had plenty of grass to chew and he thought maybe they had been idle too long. He found the lake agai
n easily enough. Rather than hobble his horse he let the paint amble about nuzzling the tall grass along the lakefront. He looked carefully for signs of life but the place was deserted. He did find old campsites, but months had passed since they’d been in use. There were no shacks or dwellings of any type around the lake. The lake itself was about sixty acres and he estimated its deep point was thirty feet. There were pines, maples and oak trees all around, but predominantly pines. So it was Pine Lake from that moment on.

  He made camp, started a fire and made coffee. He had plenty of Arbuckle’s coffee in a tin, and with the fish he caught and the prairie chickens he could survive all summer. Colorado was a world away from Arizona’s deserts, but equally as breathtaking. After a few hours he was accustomed to the throaty birdsong that sprang up suddenly and added yet another texture to his splendid surroundings. Other than the many birds he saw only small chipmunks and squirrels, and the occasional hawk. No other wildlife was visible, although Tibbs knew these woods were home to many others.

  That afternoon he witnessed a remarkable event. It was early in the afternoon and the sky was a fragile blue color marked by only a hint of cumulus clouds in the west. He had a line in the lake and he’d been busy pulling in small bass. The bass were easy to gut and made about a silver dollar sized fillet. He determined to catch an even dozen for dinner, when a shadow flashed over the lake. He stood there transfixed as an eagle swooped down from its perch in a pine tree on the opposite shore, circled high once and then dove at the crystalline surface. There was barely a splash as the eagle’s talons took a large squirming fish, and the eagle flapped heavily but swiftly and was gone into the treetops in an instant.

  Tibbs was enthralled. Such a sight as watching an eagle take a fish from just below the surface of a hidden lake was tantamount to a religious experience. And, indeed, from a frontiersman’s perspective such places were temples and all of the west was a rugged temple that tested a man’s endurance, as well as his courage.