Ralph Compton Slaughter Canyon (9781101559499) Read online

  Chapter 6

  The Quitter

  It was still full dark when Matt Battles headed north, allowing his stud to pick its way through the rain-lashed gloom.

  He paid little heed to the downpour, a man used to hard times, making do, doing without. He had seldom slept within the sound of church bells, and the parlous confines of his world were bounded by mountains, deserts, and rivers and were populated by sudden and violent men.

  Battles had killed seven such men, five in fair fights, two while fleeing arrest. None of the seven haunted his dreams o’ nights.

  He was a lean six feet, honed down by sun, wind, and winter snows to a whipcord one hundred and seventy pounds. He was as hard as an iron nail and many times more enduring.

  Battles was thirty-six that summer, but his eyes were older, faded, as though worn out by things he’d done and seen. Unyielding, dogged, steadfast, staunch, resolute, tough, fearless in the gunfight—he was all of those things and more besides.

  Of love and the softening influence of a woman, he knew nothing. He enjoyed the female body and took sexual pleasure where and when he could find it.

  He had visited many towns and none therein was glad at his coming or sad at his leaving.

  Lonely and dangerous as a lobo wolf, Matt Battles was named by some as the most effective U.S. Marshal to ever wear a star. He was unaware of that description and if he had known, he would’ve taken no pride in it.

  The rain fell steadily. The thunderstorm was now a ways off, but it circled in the distance, growling, flashing, waiting its chance to pounce again.

  Battles reckoned the New Mexico border was three miles ahead of him. Soon he’d pick up the dark bulk of the Guadalupe Ridge.

  Around him stretched a rocky land forested by wild oak, piñon, and juniper, here and there, shimmering silver in the lighting flare, meadows of grass where wildflowers bloomed.

  Trusting to the buckskin’s instincts and his own far-seeing eyes, Battles swung east around the deep chasm of Gunsight Canyon, then splashed across the Black River, low at this time of the year, months after the spring melt.

  He fetched onto the opposite bank, then fought his startled horse for a few moments as the big stud attempted to turn and run.

  What the hell?

  Then Battles saw what the horse had seen.

  A young man’s body swung from the crooked limb of a cottonwood, the toes of the boots he wore dangling just a few inches off the ground. His neck was straight, the hemp rope just under his chin.

  “They could’ve been white men enough to have at least broke your neck, couldn’t they, son?” Battles said.

  He swung out of the saddle and let the uneasy buckskin sidestep away a few yards.

  Rain rattling around him, Battles studied the dead man’s distorted features.

  He didn’t know him.

  He was a good-looking towheaded kid, the kind of boy girls love to take home to Mother. The crossed gun belts around his narrow hips—the revolvers gone—marked him as a wannabe. Only a tyro wore a gun rig like that.

  The marshal ripped the cardboard placard from around the boy’s neck. The rain had softened the paper, but the lettering, in red paint, was still readable. QUITTER.

  “What did you quit, boy?” Battles said. “Or who?”

  The dead kid’s half-opened eyes stared at him in the flashing darkness, seeing nothing, revealing nothing.

  Battles reached under his slicker, found his Barlow knife, and cut the boy down, catching his body before it thumped to the ground.

  In the marshal’s world, even the hurting dead were due at least a small measure of respect.

  The marshal laid the kid on his back and noticed something white sticking out of his shirt pocket. The rain shredded the wet paper in Battles’s fingers, but he recognized it for what it was—a letter similar to the one he’d taken from Tom Riley’s body.

  Hatfield J. Warful had also sent this kid an invitation.

  He looked at the young face more closely, wiping away rainwater accumulated in the boy’s eye sockets.

  He shook his head.

  No, he’d never seen the kid before.

  Some time back he’d read a reward dodger for a youngster wanted in connection with a stagecoach robbery and murder.

  This could be him.

  Or he could be any number of other reckless young men who longed to be a badman of reputation like that Lincoln County hellion Billy the Kid.

  Although the night was far gone, Battles had enough of riding through rain and he was wishful for coffee, if such could be made in a frog strangler.

  But no shelter was to be found, and there was no dry wood, not even a twig. He settled for a seat under the cottonwood, fetching his back against the trunk as the returning thunderstorm raved around him and lightning shattered the sky.

  The omen arrived ten minutes later, as Battles smoked his second sodden cigarette amid raindrops that ticked through the foliage of the tree.

  Does fate, destiny, call it what you will, now and then send a man a herald to warn him that his present course is doomed to disaster?

  Matt Battles, a simple man living in a simpler time, believed that it did.

  The lightning bolt was accompanied by a bang that sounded as though the top had blown off a mountain.

  Branches crashed around Battles as the trunk split and for a brief moment flames fluttered above him like scarlet moths.

  Panicked, he yelped, rolled away from the now V-shaped trunk. He didn’t stop rolling until he was a dozen yards away. Then he sat up, his eyes big as coins.

  After a few moments Battles rose groggily to his feet. Lightning scrawled across the sky like a signature on his death warrant, and the rain-riven night smelled of sulfur and fire.

  The marshal tipped back his head and vented his lungs. After his string of cussing ran out, he shouted: “Well, damn it, Lord, I know we ain’t exactly on speakin’ terms, but did you have to try and kill me?”

  Thunder roared an angry answer, and with that, the realization came to Matt Battles that God hadn’t really taken a pot at him—the lightning strike had been a sign, a warning that he should get the hell out of the New Mexico Territory.

  The last scarlet moth died in the shattered cottonwood as Battles summed things up in his mind and made his decision.

  He was acting like the old maid who hears a rustle in every bush. Omen or no omen, he was here to carry out the president’s orders.

  There was only him, nobody else.

  He had it to do.

  Chapter 7

  Cold-blooded Murder

  It’s a hard thing to leave a man unburied, but Matt Battles had no choice.

  However, he did what he could. He straightened the boy’s body, crossed his arms, and wished him well on his journey.

  The thunderstorm had fled in a sulk an hour before sunrise, throwing black clouds around it like a cloak before stomping south.

  Now Battles rode into the dawning day as the yellow haze of the aborning sun filtered through the water-ticking foliage of the junipers and wild oaks.

  After an hour, the terrain changed, abruptly becoming more typical of the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, a sandy wasteland of brush, catclaw, sotol, cholla, and most of their thorny relatives.

  Battles drew rein, a solitary horseman in a vast wilderness of mountain and sky that reduced him into a speck of insignificance.

  He built a cigarette and thought about Hatfield Warful.

  Why would anyone make his home in this godforsaken place?

  Warful obviously wanted to hide from the world, which raised another question—why?

  The obvious answer was so he could secretly recruit the twenty fastest gunmen in the West for some crackpot scheme of his.

  Battles drew deep on his cigarette, trying to puzzle it through.

  But again, why here?

  There were plenty of greener and more pleasant pastures in the western lands where outlaws could hide out. Just ask the Jame
s boys.

  No, there had to be some other reason for Warful choosing Slaughter Canyon, but Battles was damned if he could figure what it might be.

  Well, studying on it was getting him nowhere and neither was sitting his horse. He stubbed out his cigarette butt on a boot heel and kneed the buckskin forward.

  Time would answer all of his questions, he was sure.

  If he lived that long.

  The craggy rock walls of Slaughter Canyon rose sheer from the flat, its towering peaks and bluffs so dark in color as to be almost black.

  A few stunted junipers struggled on the steep slopes, battling yucca and barbed entanglements of prickly pear for living space.

  The climbing sun hammered the canyon with glaring white heat, and there was no wind. Battles’s shirt darkened with sweat, and under his hatband his forehead itched.

  He saw the three riders when they were still a ways off, men and horses elongated in a shimmering haze.

  Battles drew rein and adjusted the Colt in his waistband. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he scanned the distance, trying to make out the mood and manner of the oncoming horsemen.

  The president had told him that news of the bank robbery and murder would’ve preceded him. He hoped so. A gunfight with three men within the barren confines of the canyon was not a prospect he relished.

  His worst fears were confirmed as the riders regained their normal shape and size and spread out slightly as they came closer.

  Battles recognized Durango, his wide sombrero marking him as the breed gunman. Flanking Durango to his right was Charlie, a black killer with a beautiful baritone voice. Judging by the scowl on Charlie’s face, he planned to sing a different tune that morning.

  The third rider, a loose-geared man with yellow hair falling over his shoulders, was Dee O’Day, and he was about as mean as they came.

  Battles sat his saddle, smiling, seemingly relaxed. But inside, his stomach had tied itself in a knot.

  When the riders were within hailing distance, Battles’s smile grew into a grin and he said: “Howdy, boys. Hot today, ain’t it?”

  Durango drew rein and the others did the same.

  “Good to see you again, Matt,” the breed said. “I’ve been looking forward to it.”

  It was not a friendly greeting; it was a threat, and Battles recognized it as such, but he pretended otherwise. “You too, Durango. I trust you’re in good health.”

  “All right for a man who’s still carrying the lead you put into him.”

  Battles’s concern was as genuine as Durango’s greeting had been.

  “Your right thigh, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Left.”

  Battles nodded. “I’m real sorry about the leg. I was shooting a new Winchester that morning and she was holding a tad low.”

  “I’ll kill you one day, Matt,” Durango said, his words flat, emotionless, like lead slugs dropping into a tin coin box.

  Battles nodded. “I reckon you’ll try, Durango. You know where to find me.”

  Charlie looked at Battles with hard black eyes.

  “Heard about the bank you robbed, and the killing,” he said. “Says you gunned a poor Swede boy.”

  “News travels fast,” Battles said.

  “Lem Wilson rode in day afore yesterday, brung a newspaper,” Charlie said. “The story and your mug was on the front page.”

  “The paper says you stole ten thousand in gold,” Durango said.

  “The story says right.”

  “Then where’s the money?”

  Battles thought fast. “Hid it,” he said. “In a limestone cave down in the Sierra Diablo country.”

  Durango stared at him. He was a swarthy man in his late twenties with lank black hair and a great beak of a nose overhanging a thin pencil mustache. His eyes were a startling green, inherited from the Irish laborer father he never knew, a striking contrast to the Mexican bandito costume and wide sombrero he affected.

  “I don’t believe you hid it,” he said finally. “I think you being here is a setup and there never was any money, or any killing either.”

  “You saying I’m a liar, Durango?” Battles said.

  The man nodded. “Yeah, I’m calling it.”

  Battles had run out of room on the dance floor. The last thing he wanted was a gunfight, but to let Durango’s insult go would’ve marked him as a coward and a man not to be trusted. He’d blow any chance he ever had of penetrating Warful’s group.

  Besides, he wasn’t near sure he could shade Durango.

  Charlie saved him.

  “Durango, I believe what I read in the newspapers,” Charlie said. “I say we let the boss decide if this is a setup or no.”

  He looked at Battles, studying him.

  “Matt Battles, I’ve always knowed you fer an upright lawman,” he said. “And I tell you this: If you’re lying to us and this whole thing is a lawman’s trickery, you’ll die hard. Afore it’s over, you’ll curse the day you were born and the mother that bore you.”

  Charlie leaned forward in the saddle. “Is my meanin’ clear?”

  “As day,” Battles said.

  Durango wouldn’t let it go, at least not yet.

  “Still drawing from the waistband, huh, Matt?” he said.

  “As good a way as any.”

  “Maybe. For a damned sodbuster.”

  Battles swallowed the barb and mentally took a step back. He couldn’t allow Durango to push him into a fight.

  “Back off, Durango,” Charlie said. “I told you to let the boss handle this.”

  The breed nodded, smiling. His teeth were small and white.

  “You can’t shade me, Matt,” he said. “Not now, not ever.”

  Durango moved, the fast strike of a rattlesnake.

  Suddenly a Colt sprang into his hand and he fired.

  Stunned, Charlie looked down at the blood blossoming in the center of his chest. But only for a moment. He stood in the stirrups, said something deep in his throat, and toppled from the saddle.

  “I don’t take orders from your kind,” Durango said.

  A man long used to violence, Battles was still shocked by the suddenness of the killing. He had witnessed the cold-blooded murder of an unprepared man, a spur-of-the-moment demonstration of his prowess by an expert gunman who valued life cheaply.

  Durango glanced at Battles, then at Dee O’Day.

  “You heard Charlie,” he said. “Let’s go talk to the boss.”

  Chapter 8

  A Great Enterprise

  Durango led the way to an arroyo that doglegged to the north off the main canyon. The heat, trapped by bare rock walls, was stifling and the air smelled of dust.

  Battles’s curiosity got the better of him and he said to Durango: “Are we close to Warful’s estate?”

  The gunman grinned. “What estate? He lives in a damned tent.”

  Durango gave the marshal a sidelong glance. “He’s got a woman with him.”

  “I’d guess beautiful, huh?”

  “Yeah, if you like a gal that dresses out at around four hundred pounds.”

  Durango bit on a black cheroot, then thumbed a match into flame. Speaking around the lighted cigar, he said: “She stinks like she’s got a goat under each arm and a dead fish between her legs.”

  “Durango, you’re telling me way too much that I don’t want to know,” Battles said.

  The breed grinned. “You’ll find out.”

  Imagine a man standing seven feet tall, weighing less than a hundred and fifty pounds. Now, dress him in a suit that looks like an undertaker’s castoff. Add a completely bald head, a face like a skull, the skin tight to the bones, and eyes the color of bleach.

  Sum it all up in your mind and you have a picture of Hatfield J. Warful.

  The man stood outside his tent, flanked by a couple of gunmen, and watched as Durango rode closer, leading Charlie’s horse.

  Durango tossed the reins to O’Day and swung out of the saddle.

  He walked up
to Warfield, then did something that surprised the hell out of Battles. Durango slammed his clenched fist into the middle of his chest and gave a little bow from the waist.

  Warful mirrored the gesture and smiled, a horse-toothed grimace that held more menace than humor.

  Durango, his flared black pants cut skintight to his butt, leaned closer to Warful and started to talk urgently, gesturing to Battles and beyond him to the canyon.

  After he was done, Warful merely nodded and clapped a hand on Durango’s shoulder in a gesture of dismissal. He waited until the breed had drawn off a ways before he beckoned Battles closer.

  The marshal figured his concocted story was about to meet its biggest test, and the thought stirred no joy in him. Warful looked like a man who would take a heap of convincing.

  Battles stepped out of the leather and walked toward the giant, his hand extended and what he hoped was a friendly grin on his face.

  “Matt Battles,” he said, “and I’m right glad to meet you, Mr. Warful.”

  Warful ignored Battles’s hand, and instead made that clenched fist gesture again. Feeling like a fool, the marshal did the same.

  “Your fame precedes you, Marshal Battles. Or should I say Mr. Battles?”

  “Mister sets just fine by me,” Battles said.

  “I read of your exploits when you were still a lawman, of course,” Warful said, “and I must confess to a certain disappointment.”

  The giant smiled. “I would have expected you to be at least ten feet tall and of heroic countenance, but now I see you are really quite ordinary.”

  Battles decided to keep his mouth shut. The least said the better.

  Besides, what the hell did “of heroic countenance” mean?

  A silence fell between the two men and Warful let it stretch so long that Battles began to feel uncomfortable.

  Finally the gaunt giant said: “Why are you here?”

  Now Battles decided he was on firmer ground.

  “I heard you were hiring gun hands,” he said.

  “And how did you know this?”

  The marshal, a crick in his neck from trying to look into Warful’s eyes as a mark of sincerity, said: “I took a letter off a dead man that you’d mailed to him.”