Dark Trail (Wind River Book 5) Read online

  DARK TRAIL

  James Reasoner

  and L.J. Washburn

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by James M. Reasoner and L.J. Washburn All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address The Book Place, P.O. Box 931, Azle, TX 76020 [email protected]

  First printing: HarperPaperbacks August 1995

  Second printing: The Book Place August 2011

  For Michael and Kelly Davis

  Chapter 1

  There was one thing to be said about being the deputy marshal of Wind River, Wyoming Territory, mused Billy Casebolt: you never knew what in blazes was going to happen next.

  With that thought, he threw himself forward and grabbed for the old Griswald & Gunnison revolver holstered on his hip.

  He landed hard and painfully on the platform of the Union Pacific depot as a bullet thudded into the wall above his head.

  He was getting too damned old for fandangos like this, he told himself. But when you were packing a badge and a corpse-and-cartridge session broke out right in front of you, there wasn't any way to avoid taking a hand. Over the roar of gunplay, he shouted, "Hold on there, you two! Drop them guns!"

  The two miners ignored him. Dressed in rough work clothes, they stood about twenty feet apart on the platform and continued to blaze away at one another. So far, neither man seemed to have been hit. That wasn't too surprising. At any distance over ten feet, the old cap-and-ball pistols they carried were notoriously inaccurate.

  The two gunmen were probably in less danger than the other folks on the platform, who were all scurrying for cover. No one wanted to get hit by a stray bullet, which were flying around the platform plenty right now.

  Casebolt's lean, grizzled features twisted into a grimace. He didn't want to shoot either one of those fellas, but he might have to if they didn't run out of ammunition pretty soon. He winced as another shot slammed into the wall a couple of feet above his head. Luckily, the depot was built solidly of stone blocks and timber beams, and the walls were thick enough to stop just about anything short of a cannonball.

  "Damn it, I'm warnin' you!" Casebolt called again. "Drop them shootin' irons!"

  The miners still paid no attention to him. One of them stopped firing—but only because his gun was empty. He stood there with the weapon extended, pulling the trigger and cursing as the hammer clicked repeatedly on empty cylinders.

  The other man stopped shooting, too, but only long enough to let out a chuckle as a savage grin wreathed his bearded face. "Looks like you're plumb out of luck, Harry," he said. "You're sure as hell out o' bullets. But I got at least one left, and I been savin' it for you."

  He aimed carefully and drew back the hammer. The other man stared at the muzzle of the gun—which had to look as big around as a rain barrel right about now—and licked lips that had gone dry.

  "So long, you son of a bitch," said the man who still had bullets in his gun.

  He had gloated too long. Billy Casebolt scrambled to his feet, lunged across the platform, and lashed out with the revolver in his hand. The man saw him coming and tried to twist around to meet this new threat, but Casebolt was surprisingly fast and spry for a man of his age who appeared to be made out of sticks and twine.

  The barrel of the old Confederate revolver thudded against the man's skull and sent him stumbling toward the edge of the platform. Casebolt struck down with the gun then, cracking it across the man's wrist. With a howl of pain, the man let go of his pistol. It fell to the platform and discharged with a loud bang, making Casebolt jump even though the ball whined off harmlessly.

  Casebolt glanced around at the other man and saw that he was frantically trying to reload. The deputy brought up his gun and eared back the hammer. "Put it down, mister!" he warned. "I ain't in no mood to fool around with you boys. I'll shoot you if I have to, sure as hell."

  The man must have believed him, because he gulped and bent over to place the revolver on the platform. Then he stepped back and lifted his hands. "Take it easy, Deputy," he said nervously. "It's all over."

  "It ain't over until I say it's over!" snapped Casebolt. His heart was pounding in his thin chest, and he was still angry. He had been on intimate terms with danger for many years, but it still made him mad when he nearly got shot over something stupid.

  And there wasn't anything much more stupid than a couple of men arguing over a whore.

  "You ladies can come on out now," he called to a couple of women who were crouched behind a stack of baggage.

  They emerged somewhat hesitantly, and Casebolt couldn't blame them for that, considering how much lead had been whistling through the air around here only moments earlier.

  They straightened their fancy silk dresses and brushed themselves off, and the tall, willowy brunette said, "Thank you, sir. I can't imagine what got into those two men."

  Casebolt could. To men who had been up in the mountains lucklessly searching for gold and silver for months on end, the sight of a pair of women like these two was enough to make them downright crazy.

  The brunette was wearing a red dress with a matching hat, and despite her slender figure, she had plenty of curves to show off in the outfit. The blonde with her was a couple of inches shorter but probably twenty pounds heavier—although you didn't discuss such things with ladies, not even nymphs du prairie like these two.

  That made the blonde even more lushly proportioned than her companion, and the light blue traveling gown she wore displayed that lushness just fine. There was a smile on her round, pretty face as she came up to Casebolt and said, "Oh, thank you, sir! You saved our lives."

  Casebolt grunted. "Not hardly. I just waited until one of those ol' boys ran out of powder and shot."

  "What are you going to do with them?" the brunette asked.

  "Take 'em down to the jail, I reckon. They was disturbin' the peace real good. That'll earn 'em a few days behind bars to simmer down."

  "You mean you're going to lock them up?" the brunette asked. She sounded surprised.

  "That's generally what we do around here with folks who go to shootin' off guns for no good reason," Casebolt replied grimly. Both women looked disappointed. The blonde said, "We were hoping that once the gentlemen had calmed down, we might, ah, enjoy their company."

  Casebolt tried not to roll his eyes. It wasn't bad enough that the two soiled doves had ignited a shoot-out with their mere presence. Now they were trying to drum up some business from the very gents who had been trying to kill each other a few minutes ago.

  The morning hadn't started out badly. It was a crisp, late summer day here on the high plains of Wyoming Territory, and since there was a westbound train due to come in at ten o'clock, Casebolt had ambled down here to the station to see who got off. That was part of the routine he and Marshal Cole Tyler had established. One of the lawmen tried to be on hand at the depot every time a train came in, just to make sure no troublemakers disembarked. More than one desperado on the dodge from the law had been caught by an alert star packer keeping an eye on the train and stagecoach stations across the West.

  There weren't any stage lines serving Wind River yet, but there was the Union Pacific, which in fact was the settlement's reason for existing. Wind River had served as the railhead for a time the year before, until the construction of the UP moved on west. Earlier
this year, the final link between the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific had been completed, with the so-called Golden Spike being driven at a place in Utah called Promontory Point. Casebolt had read all about it in the Wind River Sentinel.

  With the transcontinental railroad completed, the rail traffic through Wind River was heavier than ever. West-bounds came through four times a week, eastbounds twice. It had gotten to where it was impossible for Cole Tyler and Billy Casebolt to be on hand for the arrival of every train.

  But Casebolt was glad he had been here this morning. Otherwise somebody would have likely been hurt, maybe even killed.

  He had been leaning against the wall of the station, enjoying the shade cast by the roof over the platform, when the big Baldwin locomotive pulled in with the squeal of brakes and the hiss of steam.

  The train stopped so that the passenger cars were next to the platform, and after the conductor and a couple of porters placed portable steps at the rear of each car, travelers had begun to flow out onto the platform. Some of them were leaving the train here, while others were just stretching their legs before their journey continued on to Rock Springs, Reno, or beyond.

  Some folks might be going all the way to San Francisco, Casebolt had thought, and in a way he envied them. At his age, he was glad to have settled down in a growing community like Wind River, but he remembered some wild times on the Barbary Coast when he was younger . . .

  Then the two women had gotten off the train. And all hell broke loose.

  Like a lot of people in small towns across the frontier, the two miners had evidently come down to the depot just to pass the time of day and indulge their curiosity. The arrival of a train was still an event in a place like Wind River.

  Casebolt had seen the two burly men around the town's saloons the past few days and knew from talking to some of the bartenders that they had been up in Montana Territory for the past eight months doing some prospecting. Judging by the threadbare condition of their clothes, they hadn't struck it rich—but then neither did most of the men who sought their fortunes that way.

  Both men had looked rather bored until the blonde and the brunette got off the train, and then they had perked right up. In fact, they had leaped forward with offers to carry the ladies' bags, and it hadn't taken but a minute for them to start squabbling over who was going to escort which of the women.

  The argument had been sheer contrariness, Casebolt knew, because he had heard the men swap positions several times as their voices got louder and angrier. Both of them wanted the blonde, then both decided to switch to the brunette, and they didn't have a chance to work it out before their tempers got the better of them and they reached for the pistols stuck behind their belts.

  A second later, the platform was echoing with the sound of gunshots and the acrid stink of powder smoke filled the air.

  Now, Casebolt was the only one still holding a gun, and he motioned with it to the two miners. "You fellers get movin'," he ordered. To the women, he said, "Sorry, ladies. I don't reckon you'll have any trouble findin' some other 'gentlemen' around here to keep you company, though."

  "I'm certain we won't, Deputy," the brunette said coolly. "By the way, my name is Lucy."

  "And I'm Irene," the blonde added.

  Casebolt reached up with his free hand and tugged on the brim of the battered hat that sat on his thinning gray hair. "Pleased to meet you, ladies . . . I reckon. I'm Billy Casebolt."

  The brunette called Lucy smiled. "Just what is it you 'reckon'. Deputy Casebolt? That you're pleased to meet us—or that we're ladies?"

  Casebolt took a deep breath and said, "No, ma'am, you ain't gettin' me into this conversation. I got me some prisoners to tend to." He gestured again with the revolver and said to the miners, "Thought I told you two boys to get movin'."

  Grudgingly, the men marched through the lobby of the station with Casebolt following behind them, gun in hand. They had just reached the porch on the front of the building when a well-dressed, very attractive woman with dark hair came up to the little group. She asked, "What's going on here, Billy?"

  Casebolt tugged at his hatbrim again. "Howdy, Miz Simone. Just arrestin' these fellers for disturbin' the peace. Figured the marshal'd want us to extend the hospitality of that spankin' new jail of ours to 'em for a day or so."

  "Just what were they disturbing the peace over?" Simone McKay asked.

  Casebolt hesitated, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward Lucy and Irene, who had corralled a porter into bringing their bags into the station for them. Simone looked at them, and Casebolt saw her mouth tighten.

  "I see," said the widow of one of the town's founders. Simone was also one of the richest women in the territory, thanks to the deaths of her late husband and his partner. She owned several businesses, including the hotel, the general store, and the newspaper, as well as about half of the real estate in the rest of the settlement. Over the past year and a half, she had settled comfortably into her role as the matriarch of Wind River, despite her relative youth. She looked back at Casebolt, gave him a little smile, and continued, "Well, carry on with your duties, Deputy, by all means."

  "Yes, ma'am," Casebolt said. "Move along, boys."

  As they headed west along Grenville Avenue, Wind River's main street, toward the squat stone building that had been only recently constructed, Casebolt thought about the encounter with Simone McKay. Simone was a lovely woman, the sort who looked as if she ought to wear lace and sit in a fancy parlor all day, but she had steel in her. Casebolt knew that.

  And he had seen the way she looked at those two soiled doves. Simone hadn't been happy to see them. Which meant that somebody was in for some trouble.

  Not for the first time, Casebolt was glad that he was just the deputy around here.

  * * *

  Before he came to Wind River and accepted the marshal's job—pinning on a law badge for the first time in his eventful life—Cole Tyler never would have believed that he could actually like a jail.

  But by God he liked this one, he thought as he leaned back in the chair behind his desk. This was his jail.

  Well, actually it belonged to the town, since the citizens of Wind River had paid for constructing the building. Until recently, the marshal's office had been located in the front room of the Wind River Land Development Company, and whenever he and Billy Casebolt had needed to lock somebody up, they'd been forced to use a smokehouse or the storage room of some business, any place that had a sturdy door and a lock.

  Now he had an actual office, with his desk and chair moved over from the room in the land development company, along with the old sofa, plus a new filing cabinet and a gun rack on the wall. A black, cast-iron stove sat in one corner, and there were several extra chairs in the room as well.

  In the wall behind the desk were two doors; one led to a back room with a cot and a rear exit, while the other opened into a cell block containing four cells, two on each side of a short hallway.

  The bars of the cells had been freighted in on the UP, like some of the other furnishings, and they were supposed to be escape-proof.

  The small window in each cell was also heavily barred. Jesse James himself couldn't break out of this jail, Cole thought proudly—not that Jesse was likely to be up in these parts any time soon. He and his brother Frank were busy robbing banks down in Missouri, Arkansas, and Kentucky.

  At the moment, nobody was locked up in the cells except the two men Billy Casebolt had brought in a little earlier for shooting up the platform down at the Union Pacific depot. Cole had agreed that the men needed some time behind bars to cool off.

  One of them complained that Casebolt had broken his wrist by whacking it with a gun barrel, and Cole had promised to have Dr. Judson Kent come by and take a look at it later. He wasn't in any hurry to do so, however.

  In fact, Cole thought, as he propped his booted feet on the desk and leaned back in the chair, he was going to sit right here and contemplate matters for a while longer before he did anything.


  He was a muscular, medium-sized man with sandy brown, square-cut hair that fell nearly to his shoulders. His features were permanently tanned by years of exposure to the sun and wind, and his gray-green eyes were alert and intelligent.

  He wore a buckskin shirt over denim pants that were tucked into high-topped boots. The gun-belt that was usually strapped around his waist was hung on a peg on the wall behind the desk, the Colt conversion revolver resting snugly in its holster.

  A Winchester '66 model, like the revolver a .44, was propped in the rifle rack next to a Sharps Big Fifty. The only weapon Cole was carrying at the moment was a heavy-bladed Green River knife sheathed on his left hip. He looked every inch the seasoned frontiersman that he was—even though he was a little sleepy.

  That lassitude vanished abruptly as the front door of the office opened and Simone McKay came in.

  Cole sat up hurriedly, his feet and the front legs of his chair thumping to the floor about the same time. He stood and put a smile on his face as he said, "Hello, Simone." Some people might have smiled anyway when confronted with the person who was, in effect, their boss, but in Cole's case the expression was genuine.

  He had grown quite fond of Simone over the months that he had known her. He would never forget that she was the one who convinced him to take the marshal's job after her husband was murdered.

  "Hello, Cole," she said, returning the smile. He thought she looked very attractive in a pale gray skirt and jacket over a white shirt with ruffles at the throat.

  "What can I do for you?" he asked, feeling a little tongue-tied. Simone had that effect on him sometimes.

  She came into the office and closed the door behind her. "Deputy Casebolt brought some prisoners in a little while ago," she began.

  Cole nodded. "That's right. A couple of miners who caused some sort of ruckus down at the train station. We've got 'em locked up back there. After a couple of days behind bars they'll likely think twice before causing any more trouble around here."