Микки Спиллейн - Last Stage to Hell Junction

The worst was the woman.

Well, not the worst — the headless Randy Randabaugh was not pleasant to view, though York didn’t mind not seeing that stupid face with its close-set eyes again. But the woman? Caleb York had never killed a woman before, and felt a mite bad about it.

He rested her, facedown, on top of Hargrave, face up, figuring that’s how they’d want it, though the nasty exit wound on the top of her head made him twitch a frown. He covered their final embrace with the tarp. Piling them up like that had invited a war party of flies that he’d been batting away at, getting bit a few times.

Nasty work. Nastier than killing them.

The back of the buckboard was stacked so high with the dead that he wouldn’t bother stopping on the road to add Broken Knife to his collection. He didn’t know of any warrants out on the Apache, and anyway, many people in this part of the world still didn’t value Indians much alive, let alone dead.

But York knew Broken Knife had been the toughest, hardest man he’d fought today, and he respected that.

Mahalia watched much of this from the porch, standing with a small carpetbag in her two hands, held primly in front of her. If she was troubled or sickened by the sight of him hauling dead bodies and loading them up in a wagon like bags of grain, she did not show it.

When he was done, York was sweating and worn out. Dealing with dead men was harder than handling living ones. He fanned his face with the battered gray Stetson and looked up at her from the bottom of the stairs.

“You ever drive a buckboard, miss?”

“I done it for the Wileys afore.”

He snugged on the Stetson. “Good. If you have a hanky you can tear, you might stuff some strips up your nostrils. That’ll cut the stench. Some of these freshly dead soiled themselves dyin’, and there’s one from yesterday going ripe already.”

“I’ll do that. Sheriff York?”

“Yes, miss?”

“You really not taking me to jail?”

“No, miss.”

“Where are you takin’ me?”

“The town of Trinidad will pay for a ticket on the stage to Las Vegas, and a train ticket from there to anywhere you like.”

“They do that?”

“When you save the sheriff’s life, they do. But I think Miss Filley — Rita — can find something for you at the Victory Saloon. She’ll help you with a room, too. Or Miss Cullen might have something at her ranch.”

She licked her lips. “You’re awful good to me, sir. How can I repay you?”

She was a lovely thing, but he already had one woman too many. So he simply said, “Just help me get the dead back to town. I know an undertaker who is going to be a real happy man today.”

Despite the weighted-down load, the girl did well with the buckboard. York rode alongside her, with a mule tied behind him and two horses trailing the load of corpses. When they got to the narrow road out of Hale Junction, he would move up and lead the way.

For now, they rode out of the ghost town, buckboard rumbling, York and his gelding loping along. The Main Street was so like Trinidad, with only the faded façades and blistered paint and weathered wood to say the municipality was no more. He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t burn this place down — the hotel anyway. One lit match would do the trick.

But it just didn’t seem right, somehow.

Not right at all, burning down a ghost town when it just acquired so many new residents.