Marshal Jeremy Six #1 Read online

  MR. SIXGUN

  It was a hot, dusty summer in Spanish Flat, and Marshal Jeremy Six figured on the usual amount of trouble: liquored-up miners, brawls between farmers and cowhands, and a couple of scraps over girls or cards. Then Ben Sarasen rode into town.

  Something ugly was brewing and the mood of the town reflected it. People were on edge: where Sarasen walked, so did trouble. And yet Jeremy couldn’t help respecting the man, almost liking him. But he knew that Oakley Madden’s bunch was ripe to start something, and, if so, Sarasen was pretty sure to be involved in it.

  Then, Jeremy knew, there would have to be a showdown—and either he or Sarasen wouldn’t come out of it alive.

  MARSHAL JEREMY SIX 1

  MR. SIXGUN

  By Brian Garfield writing as Brian Wynne

  First Published by Ace Books in 1964

  Copyright © 1964, 2018 by Brian Garfield

  First Edition: September 2018

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Cover Art by Gordon Crabb

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  Chapter One

  Red lances of twilight cloud painted the sky over the desert to the west, splashing color against the peaks above the eastward Mogul Rim. Traffic was light on the streets of Spanish Flat. A high-sided freight wagon toiled through the thick dust; cowhands rode quietly on various errands; the water wagon went along sprinkling the streets, matting down the loose powder beneath. At the depot a steam engine chuffed impatiently, standing restlessly still at the head of a freight train; across the tracks in Cat Town lamps were winking on and the town of night was coming to life.

  A last lamp was blown out inside the bank and the brown-coated cashier came out, locked up, and went home. By the clock up on the bank corner, it was precisely seven when Hal Craycroft gave up his vigil on the town and turned back into the Drover’s Rest to take over from the relief bartender. The saloon was moderately crowded, mainly with cowhands from Spur and Flying V and Chainlink. That was as usual; rangeland’s natural segregation made this the cattleman’s headquarters, the Buckhorn down the street the farmer’s headquarters, and the dives of Cat Town headquarters for miners, idlers, drifters, and railroad men. Craycroft looked with some pride on the Drover’s Rest: as a headquarters it represented the aristocracy of cattle country, the cow men.

  A thin haze of tobacco smoke colored the air, making it misty. Craycroft went behind the bar, put on his apron, took casual notice of a stranger at the bar dressed in wash-faded gray range clothes, and got busy fulfilling orders for drinks. At the faro rig, the house gambler was pushing his sleeves up, snapping red garters, adjusting a green eyeshade, setting out the faro box, ready to begin the evening’s dealing.

  Craycroft, who owned the place and acted as head bartender, made use of a brief lull in trade by inspecting the gray-clothed stranger. The man was of ordinary height, slim enough, regular of features though a little pale; the gun at his hip had a once-checkered black-rubber grip that had been worn smooth. The quick alert poise of the stranger’s head suggested to Craycroft that a thinly disguised lean strength lay beneath the man’s apparent calm indolence.

  The stranger’s quick eyes came around; he seemed to have sensed Craycroft’s scrutiny. He chilled Craycroft down to the bone with a single direct flash of his pale eyes, and turned away to walk out of the place.

  At that precise moment, Jeremy Six, marshal of Spanish Flat, was standing on the porch of his office with one spurless bootheel cocked up on the rail. He noticed the man in gray clothes coming out of the Drover’s Rest. The stranger looked both ways for a steady unhurried interval, mounted a chesty buckskin pony at the rail, and rode it at a leisurely gait toward the livery stable. Light from the dying sun painted animal and rider a faint crimson hue. The marshal’s interest was held by the stranger. He took note of the dusty signs of long travel on both horse and man, the long graceful smoothness of pale fingers, the jut of the black revolver grip along one thigh, and particularly the distinct brittle shine of hooded, colorless eyes that swept arrogantly across him, went on, and after a moment returned to him. Something like a signal flashed in the stranger’s eyes; abruptly he wheeled his mount in mid-course and came trotting across the street toward the marshal. The stranger reined in and said, “Six?” and when the marshal nodded, a slow thin smile crossed the stranger’s features and went away. The stranger turned and resumed his course toward the stable. Puzzled and slightly angered, Six maintained his posture on the porch. There was little to indicate that his attention was fixed to the departing horseman, except the slow steady turn of his hat brim.

  The grizzled hostler in the dank livery stable was licking dry, cracked lips, carefully counting the coins in his palm, wondering if he had enough to spare for a shot of forty-rod corn in one of the cheap Cat Town saloons below the tracks. When the cold-eyed man in the gray range outfit left his buckskin horse, with careful instructions for its care, the hostler was gratefully impressed by the extravagant tip the stranger pressed into his palm, so that he took no notice when the stranger reached the wide street door, stopped and touched his gun butt, and gave the length of the darkening street a long cautious inspection. No expression touched the stranger’s cold features. He stood a long time in the dusky doorway, then hefted the sagging blanket-roll in his left hand, stepped out, and went unhurriedly up the walk.

  Splashes of lamplight fell across the boardwalk from windows and open doors. Jeremy Six still had his boot thrust against the rail when the stranger passed along the walk opposite. A frown had lowered across Six’s forehead and sat there grimly. The stranger stopped in front of the Antlers Hotel, gave it a cursory and uncaring inspection, and disappeared inside.

  The hotel clerk was stretching on tiptoe to light a wall-lamp when the gentle slap of a hand on the desk made him turn. His glance collided abruptly with a pair of glittering icy eyes; their hollowness disturbed the clerk and he looked away in nervous discomfort. He scuttled around the desk, wiping his bald head, and from the relative safety behind the grillwork he thrust forward the pen, inkwell, and registry. When the stranger signed, the clerk said, “Day or week?”

  “I can’t say,” the stranger said. The clerk was surprised by the deep, mild resonance of the voice. Picking up the key, the stranger took his bedroll toward the stairs and, climbing, disappeared into that upper darkness. The echo of his footsteps hung behind him.

  By that time, Marshal Six had reluctantly decided to bestir himself. Down from the porch rail came the propped boot. Gathering his weight, he stood. He was about to turn into his office when a wiry figure coming down the walk arrested him. Six grunted a greeting and, by way of reply, Manny Gutierrez said, “You see him?”

  “I saw him,” Six said. “And he saw me.”

  Gutierrez was compact and dark, a man with quick eyes that missed very little. The deputy marshal’s badge gleamed dully on his shirt front. He said, “I guess you’ll have to find out what he’s up to?”

  “I guess I will,” Six said, and sighed regretfully. Up to now it had been a peaceful day. The Holliday boys weren’t in town, Oakley Madden had behaved himself and gone home to the mountains early because of his hangover
from last night, the miners had kept to themselves and there had been no clashes between farmers and cowhands. A short while ago Six had been thinking about congratulating himself on the day’s unusual peacefulness. But now that was all over.

  Ben Sarasen was in town.

  “I didn’t recognize him at first,” Six said.

  “He’s aged considerable,” Gutierrez agreed, putting his back against the wall while he slipped a thin brown cigarillo from his pocket, inserted it between his teeth, cracked a match alight on his thumbnail, and lit the cigarillo. The match’s brief flame was a sudden glare against the dark. Gutierrez stood with the cigarillo cocked upwards in his mouth and his arms folded, hat tipped forward, and said idly, “I’ll go if you want.”

  “No,” Six said, “it’s my job, not yours.”

  “As you wish.” Little noises cruised through the air, sounds of laughter and glasses clinking, the scrape of chairs and thump of boots from the saloons, the creak and sway of a buckboard rocking past in a side street. Gutierrez said, “Pablo Rubi was makin’ a fuss down at the Red Ace, but he passed out before I could arrest him. I told Maldonado to take him home and put him to bed.”

  Six nodded and pulled his hat down more firmly on his head. He had stalled long enough. “Hold the fort,” he murmured, and stepped off the curb, quartering across toward the Antlers Hotel. Loose dust boiled around his boots. The heels rang hollowly on the boardwalk and then he was inside the hotel lobby. The clerk gave him an inquiring stare and Six said, “What room?”

  “Huh?” said the clerk.

  “The gent that just came in. What room’d you put him in?”

  “The one at the back of the hall,” said the clerk. “He looked like a man who’d appreciate peace and quiet.”

  “Yeah,” Six replied drily, and turned toward the stair.

  “Marshal?”

  “What?”

  “There ain’t going to be trouble?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Six said, and went on up the stairs. The hall was dim, lit by only two candles, one at each end. He walked the length of it and knocked.

  There was no response. He rapped again and said, “Sarasen.”

  Still no reply. Shrugging, Six turned and retraced his steps. A knot of worry creased his brow. He went downstairs and back across the street and said, “Nobody home.”

  “Maybe he went out the back way,” Gutierrez said. “Maybe he’s scared of something.”

  “Him? Scared?” Six shook his head, not believing it.

  “They all get jittery, sooner or later,” Gutierrez said. “I remember what Tom McLowery got like just before the Earps cut him down. They let word out they were after him. Tom got scared, all right.”

  “He wasn’t in the same class with Sarasen,” Six answered.

  “Want me to find him?” Gutierrez said it in a matter-of-fact tone; there was no trick of rooting and scouting that he didn’t know. Nobody could shake Gutierrez off his trail, not if Gutierrez wanted to find him.

  “Don’t bother,” Six told him. “He’ll show up sometime tonight. That’ll be soon enough.”

  “It will if he doesn’t start trouble first,” Gutierrez observed. “All right, suit yourself. I got to make my rounds,” and he was gone into the darkness, a wiry bantam figure of a man moving with a whisper of cloth and a slide of soft-soled boots. Jeremy Six put a speculative eye on the hotel and then, making up his mind, he went across the street once more.

  At that particular moment, the subject of much of the town’s interest was climbing out of a hot bath in the back of the Antlers Hotel. Ben Sarasen whipped the towel across his back and felt a faint reminder of what it had once felt like to enjoy the little pleasures of life: cleanliness, being well-fed, easy sleep. All that was part of the distant past. Without emotion he felt the clean rub of his skin. There was a white scar along his upper chest, the track of a bullet. He climbed into fresh underwear and wrapped his lean, pale body in a flannel shirt and butternut trousers, in Justin boots and a calfskin vest, and in thirty-three inches of thick leather belt supporting thirty-five cartridges and one 2/2-pound Colt revolver, caliber .45. He paused before the cracked mirror that hung tilted against the wall and, meticulous with personal appearance through long habit, he ran a comb through his dark hair. It was straight hair, not too long, and shot liberally with a peppering of gray, which was deceptive; Ben Sarasen was in fact thirty-one years old.

  If he was aware in any sense of the interest his arrival had excited, he did not show it. He settled the flat-crowned beige beaver hat firmly across his head, tested the hang of his gun, and left the steamy room to walk forward through the corridor, across the lobby, out the door and up the boardwalk toward the Dutch Kitchen Café. His step was unhurried, almost indolent; it was only the constant wary scrutiny of his colorless eyes that would have revealed to an observer Sarasen’s acute alertness. His face was purposefully set: cool, ungiving, expressionless, the countenance of a man who treasured silence.

  Half a dozen customers were in the Dutch Kitchen; all of them gave him searching looks when he entered, but no one spoke to him, although he was aware of their attention lying resentfully against him, some covertly and some directly. By that sign he knew that word had spread throughout the town of his arrival. He was not troubled by their mute antagonism, so long as they kept their own counsel. The glances hit him: unfriendly, distrusting, fearful, malicious, waiting on edge.

  He walked past them among the red-and white checkerboard tablecloths to a small table in the back of the room. He sat in the accustomed manner, with his back to the wall and his left side, which was less vulnerable, toward the windows; experience had taught him early that it was easier for a right-handed man, from a sitting position, to fire across the body than to fire away from it.

  He lifted the gun unobtrusively and laid it across his lap, underneath the hanging edge of the tablecloth. It was not a particularly comfortable way to sit but a man could get used to it.

  It would have been plain, to anyone shrewd enough to see it, that Ben Sarasen expected something. But then, he always expected something. His life had run through cool-winded channels of intrigue and danger; it had trained him to be ever vigilant. Just the same, there was something additional in his attitude, something beyond ordinary alertness. He was waiting.

  The waitress, stocky and dull-looking, took his order and went back hurriedly toward the kitchen, rubbing soap-raw hands on a patched apron. Two men got up from their half-empty coffee cups, gave Sarasen long petulant looks—as if his entry had disturbed their private thoughts—and left the place. Sarasen’s eyes, never seeming to touch then directly, nevertheless remained aware of every slight motion made within his presence. His right hand remained beneath the table out of sight. He had long ago trained himself to eat, drink, smoke, and play cards with his left hand. The right hand had become like a branding iron: a tool kept within reach at all times, but seldom used, and only used for one purpose.

  Lamps flickered and smoked. The waitress, exuding the silent fear to which he was so accustomed, came and delivered his meal and scurried away, her fat hips jiggling. Another customer finished his pie and left, avoiding Sarasen’s eye. And by the time he was half through his steak, he found himself alone in the café. It did not trouble him to be alone. Loneliness was a luxury he could not afford to indulge in. It was the presence of humans, not their absence, that posed a potential threat in Ben Sarasen’s life.

  He paid his bill and went to the door. When he came outside there was a short thin man, Mexican or Indian, standing on the porch with a deputy’s badge on his front, watching him with unblinking, unswerving eyes. Sarasen challenged the man with his iron-hard glance. The other said, in a level tone, “Evenin’,” and stood his ground, meeting Sarasen’s eyes. Sarasen studied the deputy, decided there was no mortal challenge here, nodded civilly and with exact courtesy, and swung away, going down toward the hotel. Behind him the Mexican stood igniting a brown cigar, his eyes following Sarasen thoughtfully; t
his scene Sarasen witnessed in the mirror of a window across the street. Not looking back, he went up the steps to the walk and into the hotel. He climbed the stairs and walked to the door of his room.

  A candle spread yellow rays from its wall bracket. He bent down to examine the door latch. The dust he had carefully placed there was gone. Only a slight pinching of the lip-corners revealed his reaction. Studying the door with dispassionate attention, he made his decision and turned toward the candle, cupped his hand around it and blew it out. Then he lifted the gun from his holster and said, in an ordinary tone of voice, “Come out slowly and keep your hands where I can see them,” and knocked gently on the door of his own room.

  “Coming,” said a voice, muffled by the thickness of the door. To its credit, the voice revealed no surprise or anger; it was a simple, everyday, conversational voice.

  The door opened and the first thing to appear was a pair of hands, extended and empty. They were followed into view by a big-boned man who stopped in the doorway and turned his head slowly to peer along the dark hallway, and said, “I took my gun off. It’s on your bed.”

  “Smart,” Sarasen observed. “You want to talk to me?”

  “That’s right,” said Jeremy Six.

  Chapter Two

  Sarasen holstered his gun and followed the marshal into his room. A lamp burned on the commode. He pulled forward the straight-backed chair and reversed it in front of him, sitting with his knees spread past the chair back and his left arm across the top of it, his boot heels hooked into the rungs. His right hand gently pushed the door away; it clicked shut. He looked at the marshal, seated on the bed, and he said, “I gave you a chance to talk to me before.”

  “I know,” Six said.

  “This was a test?”

  “I wanted to see if you were smart enough to know I was in here,” Six told him, “and level-headed enough not to come in shooting.”