Servant of the Law Read online

  “Nice to see you again,” Sam T. offered.

  “Yes, my pleasure. It has been some time since the major’s command in Cassville.” John noted the large pistol grip that bulged out of the man’s unbuttoned coat.

  “John, Sam T. has just returned from Tucson,” Bowen said. “He has the last of the Border Gang in jail.”

  John turned and gave the tall man an approving look.

  “Sam T. is heading back to southern Arizona,” the major said. “A man believed to have been Quantrel’s captain is living the good life below the border.”

  “Good luck,” John said.

  “Thanks, I’ll need it.”

  Major Bowen was up, pacing the carpet, his hands behind his back. “John, we have word that the Coyote Kid is in eastern Arizona. Did you ever hear of him?” Bowen turned and stared hard as if waiting for a reaction. John simply nodded and waited for the man to continue.

  “Well, besides hiring out his gun,” the major said with a scowl of disgust, “the Kid shoots Mexicans like they were whiskey bottles in a dump. He could’ve stayed over in the New Mexico Territory or ridden to Colorado, but unfortunately he came west. Last we heard of him, he was around Holbrook about the time that two known rustlers were found dead.”

  John nodded. He knew that the Coyote Kid had a notorious reputation that began years before with the cold blooded killing of a blacksmith in Springfield, Colorado. Later he was accused of hanging a cattle rustler for John Chisum in New Mexico. He also reportedly shot two men who were homesteading a water hole. Hired guns like the Kid were ruthless instruments used by powerful men to enforce their own vigilante law and to repel homesteaders.

  Bowen sighed heavily. “He was taking potshots at some Mexican boys at a place called Arnold’s Store, and …” —the major paused and drew a deep breath—“in the process, he killed a six-year-old white boy. No doubt the Kid was drunk, which of course, is no excuse for any killing.”

  John’s jaw grew rigid with disgust. What kind of savage would kill a child?

  “John”—Bowen spoke his name to recall his attention—“now we know that he rode south with an accomplice. So I would suggest that you start here.” The major pointed to the map behind him. “Step over here closer and I’ll show you the location.” John followed the major’s fingers as he traced a route on the yellowing, brittle map. “You’ll need to take the train to Holbrook, then pick up a saddle and packhorse there,” Bowen stated. “I think the Kid will stay in the back country for a while.”

  “Major, you do know that they’ll probably hide him up there?” John asked.

  “Beg your pardon?” The major looked at him in puzzlement.

  John shrugged and said flatly, “These ranchers and other people that he’s worked for will hide the Kid.”

  Bowen seemed to consider the possibility, then he nodded grimly. “I suppose that you’re right.”

  Sam T. rose and walked over to the map. “He’s right, Major.” Knowingly, he repeated Major Bowen’s earlier words to John Wesley. “It’s a symptom of the disease. These hired guns are a festering boil in our society. Men like the Coyote Kid are a sign of these times.”

  The three men stood in silent agreement, their lips compressed in determination.

  John Wesley was the first to speak. “Is there a good description of this Kid?”

  “Behind you on my desk.” Bowen gestured toward a pile of wanted posters.

  John Wesley picked up two of the stiff, heavy papers and handed one to Sam T.

  Mayes sighed and looked at John Wesley with a touch of wryness. “I’m beginning to wonder which of us has the most difficult task ahead.”

  John Wesley nodded. “It won’t be a picnic for either of us.” He watched to see if Sam T. thought he was making a joke, but the large man inclined his head in agreement.

  John Wesley studied the paper in his hands and tried to visualize the man from the description.

  “Bobby Joe Budd, alias the Coyote Kid. Age: mid twenties. Height: five feet ten inches. Weight: one hundred sixty pounds. Distinguishing marks: one front tooth missing, large brown eyes, brown hair. Is a careless dresser. Carries a guardless .38 double-action Colt. To be considered armed and dangerous.” A lengthy list of law enforcement agencies on the sheet asked for his arrest.

  John ground his teeth in brewing anger. No doubt it was that .38 that had so carelessly snuffed out the life of the young child.

  5

  The Kid’s head swam dizzily. He clung to a sapling for support. Past the stage of violent vomiting, he felt bitter bile rise up in his throat with a volcanic thrust, and forced his lower jaw to hinge and his tongue to snake out in a fruitless effort. His eyes were flooded with tears and his vision distorted. “I think I’m dying,” the Kid gasped hoarsely. “I’ve been poisoned.”

  “You drank too much,” Leo quietly scolded him. “You always drink too much.”

  Panting for breath, the Kid twisted around to focus his blurred vision at his companion. “Go to hell, you son of—” His words were cut off by the retching from his stomach as it tried to eject something alien. Hands on his knees, he spat phlegm, unable to free his mouth of the sour bitterness.

  “You figure it’ll be safe for us to ride into town?” Leo asked. “This bacon’s moldy, and all we’ve got to drink is this bad whiskey we got from them three bootleggers back there.”

  “Quit your whining, Leo. I’m dying,” he huffed, “and all you can think about is damn food. Hell, if you’d told me there was a little kid out there by that store, I’d have—”

  “Jeez, Kid,” Leo interrupted defensively, “I never seen him either till it was too late. How was I to know some snot-nosed brat was sitting in the dirt there? I’m damn tired of you blaming me for this whole thing! You shot the little bastard, not me!”

  A fit of coughing prevented the Kid’s savage retort. Damn that Leo anyway. The Kid dropped to his behind on the ground, then scrubbed at his burning eyes. At last, he violently blew his nose between his fingers and flung the stream away. He wiped the balance of the snot on his pants.

  “Well, it’s a damn mess anyway! Word about it’s bound to spread all over the territory. Maybe they didn’t recognize us, huh?”

  Leo shook his head in despair. “Yeah, I hope so. Way it is, we’ve got money and no place to spend it.”

  “I aim to go in and find out if they know it was us,” the Kid said. But for the moment, he was more worried about his fading eyesight than whether some small-town law was looking for them. The blurry vision had sobered him. His fretting over the matter of his diminished sight had caused a fistful of worms to ball up in his already upset stomach. Despite his best efforts to strain his eyes and even squint hard, nothing looked clear, even the back of his own hand held inches away.

  “You mean we’re going to town?” Leo asked.

  “Shit fire, yes! We need supplies.” The Kid was determined to at least get out of their canyon hideout. He’d been denned up for four days with whining Leo and he was tired of it. After the incident at Arnold’s Store, they’d bought that bad Injun whiskey. It must have been Injun whiskey all right, the Kid reflected sourly, ’cause no sane white man would have drunk it. Besides all that, he was getting on his nerves like a hill of red ants crawling on his perspiring skin.

  “I’ll go get the horses, I know you ain’t feeling good,” Leo said and hurried off.

  Leo caught the horses and saddled them. While his cohort worked on getting ready to leave, the Kid,kept trying to see, but everything looked fuzzy. He had never had any trouble with his vision before. What had caused this?

  “You doing any better?” Leo asked, breaking into his thoughts. The man was ready to ride. The Kid reached out for the animal, finding a saddle strap to guide him.

  “My eyes are screwed up, that’s all it is,” he said, feeling for the stirrup. “I must be sun blind or something.”

  “Here, I’ll help you.”

  “No!” the. Kid said. “I can make it myself. Say,
why don’t you just lead Buster with one rein till my eyes clear up a little. They’ll get better in a little while.” In the saddle at last, he handed the rein over to Leo. Then, with his fist grasping the horn and ready to ride, he could barely tell it was day light.

  “Anything else?” Leo asked.

  “No, I’ll be fine in a little while.”

  “I sure hope so,” Leo said in a small voice.

  They started south. The Kid decided that if they had been smart they would have ridden on to Utah or Colorado, rather than staying this long in Arizona—especially after things got too hot for them to remain in New Mexico.

  He could look back and regret how they had handled the matter of that pushy rancher, Howard. A fiery Texan by the name of Mark Taylor had locked horns with Howard over water rights. So Taylor hired him and Leo to solve his problem.

  Simple enough; they had trailed Howard out of Sante Fe. Leo rode up and asked the unsuspecting man for a light. The Kid took advantage of Howard’s vulnerable position, his broad back making a large target, and he shot the man twice. They left his lifeless body in the road.

  Taylor paid them two hundred bucks in gold and thanked them. Afterward, the Kid reflected how he wished they had hidden the corpse. While no witnesses or evidence could tie them to the crime, the Kid noticed how Sheriff Garrett’s old wanted posters on the Butler episode were reprinted and began showing up in many places. Things grew so hot, it soon became necessary for the two of them to ride over into the Arizona Territory until they calmed down.

  Two weeks later in a Holbrook saloon, a ranch foreman sat down at the table with him and Leo. Obviously, this old man had something on his mind. His face was like saddle leather; his gray eyes were cold and calculating.

  The old man asked if he was the Kid,and when Bobby said yes, he whispered that his name was Wagoner and told them how two rustlers had eluded him. He knew the pair was guilty, but couldn’t get the proof to legally bring them to justice. Then he stated in a biting tone that these rustlers had to be stopped one way or another.

  “It’ll cost you a hundred apiece,” the Kid informed him flatly.

  “They ain’t worth that much,” the foreman complained, obviously holding out for a lower price.

  Wagoner was a hard case, but if the rustlers had been so easy to capture, the man would’ve been able to do it himself without calling on the expertise of the Coyote Kid. Bobby shrugged away the man’s effort to get him down and stuck to his price.

  “We’ve got our expenses.”

  When Wagoner realized he meant business, he complied irritably. “All right, all right. But I want the job done right and soon.”

  “It will be.” Just who the hell did this old bastard think he was dealing with? He always did the job right; there had never been any complaints. Hell, just ask any dead man. Except for that damn fussy Chisum. The Kid curled his lip in cynical amusement when Wagoner tried to pass the blood money under the table.

  “Who do you need to get rid of?” he asked, not bothering to keep his voice to a whisper. He laid out the bills on the table in a move of smug confidence and began to count it slow like, straightening the edges all even in the stack.

  Wagoner cringed at the flagrant sight of the blood money and leaned forward. “Tom and Harry Slatter. They live west of town. They got a batching outfit in a shack.” The ranch foreman gave the information quickly, in a hurry to get away from their company.

  “Wait,” the Kid said. This old buzzard was not getting off that lightly. “Me and my buddy Leo here ain’t too familiar with the area. You better tell us exactly how to get there.”

  He felt important when Wagner squirmed uncomfortably on his chair. The longing looks he cast toward the batwing doors of the saloon filled the Kid with smug amusement. This old man wasn’t any different than a lot of others who had hired him to do their dirty work. Once they handed him that money, they felt that they were clean of the whole thing. Hell, they were the real killers. All he did was pull the trigger.

  Looking ill at ease, Wagoner wrapped his hands around the shot glass of whiskey on the tabletop, then spoke quickly. “You go west out of town, cross the wash, then you’ll see some hills. The Slatters’ place is in the second draw. It’s almost hidden unless you’re especially looking for it. When you ride up, you’ll see a cow skull on a post. She has drooping, long horns.” The man downed the whiskey, looked across the table at Leo, then at the Kid. “Think you can find it?”

  The Kid glanced at Leo, who merely nodded. He never said much when negotiations were taking place, which was just as well, because Leo might have let tough guys like Wagoner beat down their price.

  “Hold on a minute, mister,” the Kid insisted as the man began to rise. “We want to buy you one more whiskey. Since we’re working for you, it’s only fitting that we buy you another drink.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” Wagoner agreed. Obviously it wasn’t because he wanted another one, but because he had no other choice. The Kid thoroughly enjoyed this man’s discomfort. A guy like this usually gave orders. It was time Wagoner took a few; it might do him a lot of good. Besides, it was important that the man realized just who he was dealing with.

  The following morning they went after the Slatter brothers. Like Wagoner said, they found the cow skull and rode right past it to the patched-up shack. Looking the place over, the Kid noted a couple of skinny horses in the pole corral. The homestead consisted of a ramshackle hut and a pole pen, reinforced with more posts to brace the weaker ones.

  “Hey! Hello the house!” He shouted the customary greeting.

  A grizzled face and a dull-barreled rifle appeared in the doorway. Even at that distance, the Kid easily read suspicion in the man’s piglike eyes.

  “What do you want?” the man demanded harshly.

  “Say, mister,” the Kid began in a reasonable tone, “I ain’t here for trouble.” He looked around the area as if he were expecting someone else to be about the place. Where was the second brother? Must be inside, he decided. After settling back in his saddle, he continued. “Me and my pal Leo figured we could do some business with you.”

  The man kept the gun on them as he spoke. “Yeah, just what kind of business?”

  “Put the gun up. I’m the Coyote Kid, and this here’s Leo Jackson.” With that announcement, he stepped off his horse. He felt certain that if the man had intended to shoot them, he would have already used the gun in his hand.

  “What do the two of you want?”

  “Leo?” The Kid turned to his friend and frowned in pain. “How many steers do we need to feed that survey crew?”

  “It’ll take at least one a day. They all eat like bears.” Leo spouted their prearranged lie. “’Course, we can always get them somewhere else.”

  “Wait, just a minute,” the man said. “Come on in here where we can talk.”

  The Kid nodded to Leo in approval as they dismounted. Their plan was working. The two of them followed the man inside the hovel.

  “I’m Tom. That there is Harry.” The man pointed to a shape in the corner of the darkened shack. Then he laid his rifle across the bare wood table and peered at them as he asked, “Who sent you up here?”

  The Kid drew closer to the table and spoke mildly. “We listened around the saloon. See, me and Leo here are guards and outfitters for that big survey crew. We need to make a couple extra bucks a head off the food that we buy for them. You savvy what I’m talking about?”

  Tom looked back at his brother for his answer. Harry was seated on a bed of tattered quilts. At last, he scrubbed his face and said with keen suspicion, “How do we know you ain’t the law?”

  ‘Ain’t you ever heard of the Coyote Kid?”

  Harry looked at Bobby uncertainly. “Yeah, I heard of him, but that don’t make you him.”

  With a grim set to his mouth, the Kid straightened and turned to Leo. “Leo, tell these yahoos who I am!”

  Leo kept his voice to a low warning pitch. “Mister, he’s sure enough the Kid, b
est not to rile him up.”

  As his partner spoke, the Kid assumed a bored attitude, casually looking around the dingy, smelly room and satisfying himself about the lay of things.

  “Yeah, just because you say so, don’t make it true,” Tom said to Leo, keeping a wary eye on the Kid the whole time.

  Filled with impatience, the Kid jerked his head up and gave the stupid man a scathing look. “What the hell do you think I do? Carry a damn wanted poster around with me?” He sighed in disgust and nodded at Leo. “Come on, Leo, obviously these guys don’t want to do any business. Let’s go somewhere else!”

  “Right, Kid.” They turned toward the door.

  “Whoa, wait a minute, Kid,” Tom said. “Harry, what do you think?”

  “Well, we could use the money,” Harry put in reluctantly. “I figure they’re who they say they are.”

  Behind a hidden smile of satisfaction, the Kid turned back toward the men, sticking his thumbs in his belt and frowning. “Let’s talk money.”

  “Yeah,” Tom interrupted quickly. “How much you planning to pay us?”

  “Twenty dollars a head.” Then he said over his shoulder, “Leo, go get us some whiskey, so we can close this deal. It’s in the left side of my saddlebags.” He turned back and sat down on a nail keg, facing the two of them. “Me and Leo get five bucks; you get fifteen.”

  “Hell, no!” Tom protested. “We’ve got to do all the work and you and him get all the gravy. We’re taking a hell of a risk as it is.”

  As if it made no difference to. him, the Kid shrugged. He sure didn’t want the two upset before he sprung his trap. “All right. You get sixteen; we get four.”

  “How come they’re willing to pay so much for beef?” Harry asked. His questioning gaze cut back and forth from his brother to Bobby.

  “’Cause,” he explained, “they don’t know nothing about beef prices around here.” He heard Leo returning and looked up in relief at him, seeing the brown bottle in his hand. A good shot of rotgut would settle his gun hand.