Микки Спиллейн - Last Stage to Hell Junction

That none of the outlaws had thought to check the identity of Doc Miller’s silent passenger was a blessing; but the possibility of that turning to a curse hung over everything.

For the next half hour York strolled Main Street, taking in the weathered façades of the theater where Hargrave had likely once performed, a general store, café, post office, saloon, assay office, and dead lumberyard, among others. He was a military man taking stock of a potential future battlefield.

On the side streets and two streets behind Main on either side were perfectly good houses, if paint-blistered and broken-windowed, their yards scruffy with weeds, echoes of the boisterous, growing community Hale Junction had not long ago been.

It was as if some plague out of the Middle Ages had hit, decimating the population and leaving their dwellings and businesses behind. How easily Trinidad could become such a place, if dire circumstances prevailed. York felt those who tried to keep the railroad out might have consigned Trinidad to a similar fate, but that bullet had been narrowly dodged. Fear of natural progress could be as deadly as the Black Death.

York returned to the hotel, where the Indian still apparently slept on the porch — the lawman collected the dappled gelding and walked it to the livery stable. There he found the stagecoach stowed away, as Hargrave had indicated, its Morgan horses in stalls. Gert, Tulley’s mule, was in a stall here, too — obviously the old boy had done some scouting himself, and found the back way into the livery.

The man who wasn’t Bret McCory fed hay to the gelding, then used those rear doors to skirt behind several buildings, winding up at the two-story structure whose bottom floor had once been the general store. The living quarters above, abandoned obviously, were accessible by an exposed stairway on the far side of the structure, not visible to the Indian on guard across the way, should the red man’s slumber turn out to be faked.

After going in through what had been a kitchen, and crossing a hallway that cut the second floor in half, York entered a front parlor, where Tulley was seated near double windows that wore what little remained of its glass in jagged irregular teeth around the edges. Moonlight leached in, giving the desert-rat-turned-deputy and the area near the broken windows puddles of ivory to bask in on the street side of a room otherwise lost in darkness.

Unlike the Indian on the porch, Jonathan Tulley — scattergun across his lap, much as that ex-cavalry scout’s rifle had been across his — was definitely asleep... unless the snoring the deputy was doing was worthy of an actor more skilled even than Blaine Hargrave. At least the sound of the logs Tulley was sawing didn’t carry — York had walked past the general store and heard nothing.

The sheriff stepped gingerly into the darkness, but his boots announced him, crunching under their tread.

Tulley was instantly awake, jerking that shotgun and its twin black eyes up toward York, who said quietly, “It’s me, Deputy. Lower that scattergun if you want your next paycheck.”

Tulley’s smile appeared in his beard like a blade glittering in the night. “You ain’t much on sneakin’ up on folks, is you, Caleb York?”

York knelt, his night vision with him enough now to see that Tulley had spread pebbles from the street all around the entry area into the room. Smiling, he rose and moved past the crunching little rocks that had exposed his presence. Then he crouched near Tulley by the windows onto Main.

“I tell people all the time,” York said, “that they underestimate you. You took a look around, I see.”

“How do ye know that?”

York brushed some dust and dirt away from the floor and sat by his deputy, his back against the wall.

“I figured,” he said, “Gert didn’t put herself in that stall. Come sunup, if nothing has transpired, you best move her back behind this building. There’s trees back there where you can hitch her up.”

Tulley nodded. “Best nobody from them lodgings ’crost the way should spy a strange mule amongst their familiar steeds.”

“Right. But for now Gert’s fine where she is.” He gestured toward the street. “What did you see? Anyone standing guard or working the periphery?”

“Nossir. Jest that injun feller. He’s small but big trouble, I reckon, iffen you should get on the wrong side of him.”

“An ex-cavalry Apache scout? Yes. I’d wager he’s the most dangerous one over there. But a couple of them are damned dumb, and nothing is more dangerous than an idiot with a gun.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Tulley said, nodding as he clutched the scattergun to him like a baby.

York almost grinned at that, but Tulley was no idiot — though the old boy was dangerous in his own right.

“Was that Doc Miller,” Tulley asked, excited suddenly, his head bobbing toward the street, “I seen go up in there?”

York explained that the doctor had been brought here to deal with a wounded gang member, and also told his deputy about the wicker coffin the buckboard bore.

“Iffen somebody spies that dead feller,” Tulley said, eyes wide, “we’re gonna have a shootin’ war upon us.”

“We will at that. Only they’re a regiment and we’re a couple of spare troopers.”

Tulley squinted at his boss. “What’s your plan, Caleb? Knowin’ you as I do, there must be a plan.”

“Just the beginnings of one. All I really know is that the longer I wait to spring those hostages, the worse off we’ll all be. Best we do this before morning, with the dark for a friend.”

“No argyment.”

York grimaced. “But I still haven’t had an opportunity to get a handle on the layout of that damn place. Haven’t even been upstairs yet. It’s my intention, my hope, to find a back way out, and sneak those hostages free.”

Tulley frowned in thought. “Where does I come in?”

York gestured with a thumb over his shoulder. “When I give you the signal, head down to the livery and hitch those horses up to that stagecoach. Go in those rear doors, of course. Keep the horses settled. Be nice and easy with ’em as you hitch ’em up. You don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.”

“Shore don’t.”

York shook a finger at his deputy. “Stay right there, sit tight and wait. If things get noisy across the way — gunfire, yelling — that’ll tell you something went awry. Drive that coach up to the hotel, hell bent. I should be flying out of there with those folks.”

“From around back?”

“Probably from in back, but I can’t be sure. So when you bring that coach to a stop, position it between the hotel and its neighbor to the east. The assay office.”

“Assay office, yessir.”

“If you don’t hear anything alerting you to trouble,” York said, “just stay put there in the livery. It’s possible I can make my way there with the hostages without alerting anybody.”

“Iffen we take that coach down Main,” Tulley reminded him, “they’ll know we’re leavin’, all right.”

York held up a cautionary palm. “If I’m able to sneak everybody out, we’ll head over to the livery and meet you there, going in the back way. Willa Cullen is a skilled rider — she can go bareback on one of those Morgans. Parker knows how to ride and the Filley woman, too — maybe not expert, but good enough.”

“What about the doc?”

“If Miller can’t get to his buckboard, we’ll need a horse for him, as well. He can muddle through a bareback ride, if need be. If we can sneak out on the street behind us, we won’t be chased, not for a while anyway. But if they’re on to us, we need the coach. And going down Main’ll be the least of our worries. Got all that?”

Tulley was thinking. “Might be they’s saddles somewhere in that livery.”