Rawhide Flat Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Lawman

  A rust-colored dog glanced at Crane, looked longer, then slunk away, its tail between its legs. Half a dozen hogs rooted noisily among the restaurant waste tossed in an alley, and somewhere a late-rising rooster crowed with hollow pride that the new day had begun.

  There was something in Crane’s walk and face that caused people to stop and watch him pass. None showed the admiration due a resolute lawman, only puzzlement and a shadow of fear. The marshal was wearing the gunfighter’s mantle and such men were best avoided.

  Crane was halfway to the saloon when the sound of a gunshot stopped him in his tracks. Then he started running. . . .

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, February 2009

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2009

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  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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  eISBN : 978-1-440-68759-4

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  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, allowing 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 1

  Sometime during the roaring, hurtling night, two nuns perched like black crows on the seats opposite Deputy United States Marshal Augustus Crane. The women watched him intently, their bright black eyes glittering.

  Warned by an instinct as ancient as man himself, Crane woke.

  His uneasy glance moved to the nuns, but he sensed no threat. He smiled, touched his hat, then looked out the window, where sparks from the locomotive’s stack danced past like fireflies. Beyond lay pitch darkness, and the only sensations of speed were the rattling of the coach, the clack-clack of steel wheels on iron rails and the shifting orange light from swaying oil lamps.

  One of the nuns made a small sound and Crane again turned to them.

  Both held rosaries, ebony beads separated by tarnished silver chains. The beads clicked through their fingers and the nuns’ mouths moved, whispered prayers hissing through their lips with the sound of slender snakes.

  The women’s skin was as yellow as old parchment, drawn tight to their bones. Shallow wrinkles threaded around their eyes and foreheads, and starched white wimples framed their faces like war helmets. Their black habits were frayed and showed signs of constant darning.

  They could have been thirty years old, Crane guessed, or a hundred. He decided, if he got close enough to them, they would smell of dust, holy relics of the ancient dead and the smoke of wax candles.

  Sitting just inside the door, the back of the marshal’s wooden seat was jammed against the wall. The rest of the carriage, bathed in the trembling half-light, stretched away from him.

  There were only two other passengers. A puncher, dressed in a sweat-stained hat and faded range clothes, dozed off, drunk,
his chin on his chest. The other man, also asleep, wore gray broadcloth—a drummer, Crane figured, or a businessman of some kind, of which there were many around, all of them getting rich off Comstock silver and the backbreaking labor of miners.

  Surprised, Crane heard one of the nuns talking to him. Her voice was melodious and cultured, the educated tone of a gentlewoman.

  “You are planning to disembark at Rawhide Flat, Marshal?” She noted Crane’s surprise and added, “The star on your chest is quite obvious.”

  “It’s the end of the line.”

  “For many people, I’m afraid.” The nun tried a smile, did not succeed, and said, “I am Sister Marie Celeste. My companion is Sister Theresa Campion.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sister.”

  Crane looked at the other nun. Her head was tilted back, her gaze lifted to the roof of the carriage as she tolled her beads. Blue-veined lids closed over her eyes, beautiful lashes fanning black and lacy over her cheekbones. Her lips moved ceaselessly.

  “There is trouble in Rawhide Flat,” Sister Marie Celeste said. “That is why you are here?”

  Crane nodded. “Yes. I have an arrest to make.”

  “The black man?”

  “Yes. Him.”

  “I am told he will hang.”

  “A judge will decide.”

  “But he will hang nevertheless,” the nun said.

  “Judges find it easy to hang a black man. Not many people care.”

  “If he’s guilty, he will hang. Yes.”

  “Oh, he’s guilty. Not much doubt about that.”

  “I don’t know anything about him. I’ve never met the man or spoken to the arresting officer.”

  “Sheriff Paul Masterson arrested him.” The nun’s eyes went to the rectangle of black ink that was the window, and without turning she said, “Sheriff Masterson is a very hard man.” She looked at Crane again. “I think you are too”—she again tried to smile and this time succeeded, conveying surprising warmth—“what the cowboys call a hard case.”

  “Goes with the star, Sister,” Crane said. He was amused. “When you hire on for the job, the first question they ask is, ‘Are you a hard case?’ ”

  “They ask aspiring nuns that very same question, Marshal.”

  Crane laughed. “Yeah, I guess they do.”

  The young cowboy stirred, drawing the marshal’s attention. Blinking like an owl, the cowboy looked around him, dry tongue smacking inside an arid mouth. His gaze met Crane’s and held it for a couple of heartbeats. Then the puncher glanced away. He stared out the blank window, not wanting to ever look into Crane’s eyes again.

  The nun was talking. “Sister Theresa Campion is praying for you, Marshal.”

  Crane was startled. “Praying for me?”

  “Yes, for your welfare.”

  The other nun was now staring straight ahead, seeing nothing, ticking beads tumbling through her fingers. Her face held a strange radiance, as though it were lit from within by a magic lantern.

  “Sister Theresa Campion saw you in a terrible dream. That’s why she says the rosary for you.”

  Crane had been trying to stifle a yawn. Now Sister Marie Celeste’s words did it for him. “Is she sure it was me?”

  “A tall man with white eyes, hair as black as jet, a star within a circle pinned to his shirt, a blue revolver with a bone handle at his waist . . . Who else could he be but you?”

  Crane was not by nature a superstitious man, but he felt a shiver slide along his spine. “What did she see?”

  “Fire . . . and death.”

  “Whose death?”

  “Among others, her own.” Sister Marie Celeste’s eyes burned like coals. “You will kill her amid fire.”

  A silence echoed between Crane and the nun, and the marshal studied his options on how to fill it. In the end he settled for humor. He smiled.

  “Sister, I may be a hard case, as you say, but I make it a policy never to shoot nuns. I don’t shoot priests either. I also don’t kill babies, kittens or puppies.”

  “We saw you at the train station, Marshal. Sister Theresa Campion said, ‘That is the man in my dream.’ She was so sure.”

  “I thought nuns had only good dreams, about heaven and Jesus.”

  “Not always. Sometimes we dream of hell.”

  Sister Theresa Campion’s eyes opened. She turned to Crane and smiled at him. Her teeth were small and irregular, but very white. “I don’t know if putting faith in dreams is a mortal sin. But perhaps it was not a dream after all, but a vision.”

  “I won’t shoot you, Sister.” Crane grinned. “I plan to pick up my prisoner and return to Virginia City on this train. I’ll be in Rawhide Flat an hour, no longer.”

  The nun shook her head, the starched wimple rasping slightly against her dry cheek. “That is not for you to say, Marshal. The Lord’s will will be done. If he has ordained a violent death for me at your hand, so be it.”

  Caught unawares, Crane sat higher in his seat and desperately tried to angle the conversation away from dreams and doom. “Do you ladies reside in Rawhide Flat?”

  Sister Marie Celeste answered, “We have a house there, the Convent of St. Michael the Archangel. Ours is a teaching order, and we hold classes for the children of the silver miners—reading, writing and ciphering mostly, but also some arts and crafts.”

  “All that must keep you busy.”

  “Not really. Most of the mining children attend schools in Virginia City or Carson City. Rawhide Flat is a cattle town and a fair distance from most of the Comstock mines.”

  “Cattlemen have kids.”

  “Yes, they do, and we teach a few of those as well.”

  Crane was not normally a talking man, and he tried again to dip into the word well but found it dry. The nuns were watching him expectantly, as though hanging on his every utterance.

  The conductor, however, saved the marshal from the need to speak. The man swayed through the carriage, a large brass railroad watch in his hand. “Raw-hide Flat in fifteen minutes, folks,” he said. “End of the line.”

  The conductor vanished into the next coach. The Virginia and Truckee train was made up of two carriages and a single boxcar that carried only Crane’s horse and the cowboy’s mustang.

  The marshal glanced out the window, where the departing night was now giving way to a gray dawn. To the west, the ten-thousand-foot peaks of the Carson Range still wore the darkness like a cloak and were not yet visible.

  Crane sighed and stretched his long legs, carefully avoiding the skirts of the nuns’ habits with his spurs. He searched, finding enough words to tell a small lie. He said, “It’s been a real pleasure talking with you ladies.” His eyes moved to Sister Theresa Campion and he grinned. “No more bad dreams, huh?”

  The nun gave him a smile of incredible sweetness and Crane rethought her age. She might be only about eighteen.

  “Trust me, we will meet again, Marshal,” she said.

  “That I doubt. The kind of places I frequent are not for nuns.”

  “Nonetheless, Marshal, I know we will meet.”

  Crane gave up the struggle. He’d heard how stubborn nuns could be and this one must be typical of the breed.

  He rose to his feet, touched his hat to the sisters, then turned and opened the door to the small platform at the end of the carriage. He stepped outside, closed the door behind him and gulped a few breaths of fresh, cool air.

  He was more troubled by the nuns’ talk than he cared to admit.

  But as he built a smoke he began to rationalize it.

  Strip away the black habits and you’d find that the sisters were just women, and females were inclined to all sorts of strange notions and fancies.

  Crane thumbed a match into flame, sheltered it with cupped hands and lit his cigarette. As blue smoke twisted around his head he leaned against the door of the coach, feeling the vibrations of the wheels under his feet.

  He smiled. He was in town to pick up a prisoner, not shoot nuns
. The entire conversation had been ridiculous, the quaint fantasy of women who had been shut up in cloisters for too long.

  The train was slowing and the brightening landscape of hills, brush and hardwood trees no longer hurtled past at breakneck speed. Crane could make out a few houses in the distance and white-faced cattle drinking at the creeks. It was a tranquil scene, one that convinced a man he could get his business done quickly and be on his way.

  Then why did he feel on edge?

  Crane flicked away the butt of his cigarette. It was the nuns. There was no other reason. He’d taken men into custody before, dozens of times, all of them hard cases of one kind or another. Apart from his having to shoot a couple, most of his arrests had gone smoothly.

  The marshal nodded to himself. Yes, it was the nuns. It had to be those two black, ill-omened crows cawing of death and fire. They would have put any man on edge.

  Chapter 2

  A jade sky ribboned with bands of red and deep violet arched over Marshal Crane’s head as he led his saddled buckskin down the ramp from the boxcar and onto the flat.

  The air smelled of morning and the dung of the empty cattle pens that surrounded the railroad station and elbowed close to the track.

  Hissing like a dragon, the locomotive vented steam, and the fireman was inspecting the wheels, a hammer in one hand, an oilcan with a slender spout in the other.

  The young cowboy from the train was already in the saddle. He gave Crane a last lingering look from boots to hat, swung his yellow mustang to the west and cantered away.

  Smiling, the marshal nodded to himself and in the manner of men who ride lonely trails, he voiced his thoughts aloud. “Good for you, kid. It pays a man to be aware. If you live long enough, you’ll make your mark.”

  Crane’s pale gray eyes moved to the station platform. There was no sign of the broadcloth suit, the nuns or other passengers. An errant gust of wind lifted a scrap of paper and drove it against the ticket office window. For a few moments the paper fluttered like a trapped moth, then, bored, the wind let it drop to the platform again.