Ralph Compton - West of the Law

He was behind the dead girl now, close to her body, and the smell of rotting flesh was almost unbearable. McBride put a hand over his mouth and nose and studied the soft, dry dirt behind the doorway. There was a single set of prints, the wide, low-heeled outlines of a miner’s boots. The square toes were facing the girl’s back.

McBride lurched away from the body and put it together when he reached the cleaner air outside.

The girl had been small and light, too light to strangle easily in the noose. A man, probably a miner, had stood behind the girl and pulled down on her body, hastening her death. It had not been an act of mercy. He, and presumably others with him, had wanted to make certain she died.

And Prescott had been right. The little Chinese girl had died hard, slowly and with much pain and fear.

But the question remained: Why?

‘‘We can’t leave her hanging there,’’ Prescott said when McBride rejoined him. ‘‘It isn’t decent.’’

‘‘No, it’s not,’’ McBride said.

‘‘Maybe we can bury her.’’

‘‘But not near deep enough.’’

‘‘Then what, John?’’

‘‘There are dry timbers in the cabin. We’ll burn her body.’’ He turned and looked at Prescott. ‘‘Go into the cabin and get the fire started.’’

‘‘Me?’’

‘‘Yes, you. Out here a man should know how to make a fire. He just never can tell when he’ll need one.’’

Prescott’s eyes revealed that he’d caught the irony, but he let it pass. ‘‘The smoke will be seen for miles and the men who did this could still be close.’’

‘‘So? We’re just a couple of travelers riding through pass-on-by country who happened to stop to give a dead girl a decent funeral. They won’t fault us for that, at least not much.’’

Prescott thought that through, then nodded and slipped the bandanna from his face. ‘‘I sure hope you know what you’re doing, John. And after it’s over, what then?’’

‘‘Like you say, the men who murdered the girl could be close. We will go find them.’’

‘‘And then?’’

McBride’s eyes were wintry. ‘‘We’ll kill them all, Luke. Everybody lives, but not everybody deserves to.’’

The little gunfighter grinned. ‘‘John McBride, I have the feeling you’d make a mighty bad enemy.’’

‘‘Believe it,’’ McBride said. He did not smile.

Together they cut down the girl’s body, an unpleasant task that had to be done, and laid her out as gently as they could on a pile of timbers. Despite the recent rain the wood was tinder-dry. Prescott used the pack rat’s nest for kindling and the old roof beams readily caught fire. When the timbers were blazing fiercely, sending up a thick column of gray smoke, they stepped back and watched the cabin burn.

‘‘We should say some words,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘What god would that little Celestial gal pray to?’’

‘‘The same god we pray to, I imagine. He might have a different name in China, that’s all.’’

‘‘Well, I don’t know any of the words anyhow,’’ Prescott said. ‘‘The times I watched men get buried, a preacher always read from the Book. Them was a heap of words and not something a man can easily recollect.’’

‘‘If we knew the words, we’d say them, Luke. I’d guess right about now the little Chinese girl knows that.’’

After the fire had died away to ashes, Prescott rounded up his horse and McBride reluctantly climbed onto the bony back of the mustang. As the sun dropped lower in the sky and their shadows grew long, they rode out of the meadow and again followed the wagon trail.

The trail wound upward through stands of ponderosa and aspen, curving around huge out-croppings of granite rock that grew more numerous as they climbed higher and the air thinned. After an hour the sun was a dull crimson ball low above the western horizon, adrift in a sky the color of ancient jade. A stiff breeze had picked up, whispering wild stories to the aspen that set their leaves to trembling.

They came up on the water tower of the Union Pacific just as the day was shading into night and the trail petered out to nothing. The tower stood on a siding and close to it was a piled-high pyramid of sawn logs for the furnaces of the locomotives. A small shed with a padlocked door stood a ways from the track, a wooden wheelbarrow leaning against one of its walls.

‘‘There’s nobody home,’’ Prescott said, drawing rein on his horse, his eyes restlessly searching the shadowed, aspen-covered hills that rose on either side of the rails.

‘‘If Trask’s men take the Chinese girls and opium off the trains here, there could be another wagon trail that we’re not seeing,’’ McBride said.

‘‘Unless they load them up and head for High Hopes right away,’’ Prescott said.

‘‘We didn’t meet anybody on the trail,’’ McBride said. He groaned softly and shifted uncomfortably on the mustang. ‘‘That means whoever murdered the Chinese girl is still around.’’

‘‘Or she may have been dead longer than we reckoned. If that’s the case, her killers could have taken the wagon trail before us.’’

McBride nodded. ‘‘There’s still enough light for us to scout around and see if there’s another trail headed away from the siding.’’

Prescott found the trail a few minutes later, a narrow wagon road cut through the aspen that had been just out of sight behind the log pile. He called McBride over and pointed at the hill rising above him.

‘‘The trail cuts across the saddleback. It’s got to end up somewhere. I’m betting at a cabin or maybe a cave.’’

‘‘We’ll leave the horses here and go take a look,’’ McBride said. ‘‘I don’t want to be slip-sliding on the back of the mustang when the shooting starts.’’

Prescott glanced at McBride’s gun in the shoulder holster. ‘‘You as good with that self-cocker as I heard?’’

‘‘I don’t know what you heard, but I’d say I’m fair to middling.’’

‘‘If there’s more than two of Trask’s men, you might want to try real hard to do better.’’

McBride smiled. ‘‘I’ll try, Luke. Yes, I’ll try real hard.’’

He watched Prescott swing out of the saddle, briefly envied the man’s casual elegance, then clambered off the back of the mustang. He had not eaten since breakfast, and there hadn’t been much of that, and his stomach rumbled loudly as he and Prescott took to the wagon trail and climbed toward the gap of the hollow hill.

They drew the night around them like a cloak and became one with the darkness. Very near, an owl asked its question to the heedless wind, then demanded an answer again. Prescott, a horseman unused to walking, made his awkward way along the sunbaked clay of a wagon-wheel track. His spurs were chiming, bootheels thudding on dry pine needles. McBride was glad they were not facing Apache. The dime novel he’d read said the savages heard every sound, even the faintest whisper, and would suddenly come charging out of the dark whooping and hollering, waving their murderous tomahawks.

He remembered a line from the book that had struck him: ‘‘Many a lovely lass in the first blush of maidenhood they’ve undone, many a stalwart frontiersman they’ve murdered, many a poor old mother’s heart they’ve broken.’’

McBride nodded to himself. That was a haunting line, penned by a good writer. Someday he’d like to read—

‘‘The gap is just ahead,’’ Prescott said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘‘Keep your rifle up and ready.’’

They reached the crest of the gap and stopped, staring into the night. The moon was rising, but its light was dim, lying thin on the land. McBride could make out the slope of the hill falling away steeply from where he stood, and something else—the lights of a cabin hanging like lanterns in the darkness.