Marshal Jeremy Six #8

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  Jeremy Six, marshal of Spanish Flat, Arizona Territory, pocketed his law badge and rode across the Mexican border on a personal vendetta. His prey was Steve Lament - gambler, gunslinger, and the slayer of Jeremy’s girlfriend.

  Six soon found himself embroiled in the chaos and destruction of the Mexican revolutionary struggle. Relying on instinct instead of common sense, Six found himself choosing sides - and the lawman in him was outraged.

  But Jeremy Six was not the only one who struggled with his conscience even as he battled for his life. There was still Steve Lament …

  MARSHAL JEREMY SIX 8:

  BIG COUNTRY, BIG MEN

  By Brian Garfield writing as Brian Wynne

  First Published by Ace Books in 1969

  Copyright © 1969, 2020 by Brian Garfield

  First Digital Edition: August 2020

  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: Mike Stotter

  Cover Art by Gordon Crabb

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  One

  The two horsemen rode into Jeremy Six’s town at five in the evening, loping south from the Mogollon country. The tall one said, “Spanish Flat. I hear Clarissa’s got a place here now.”

  “That a fact?” his partner inquired politely. They breasted the head of the main street and the tall one stopped a passerby to ask the way to Clarissa Vane’s saloon.

  “That’d be the Glad Hand. Turn to your right down at the corner and go back three, four blocks. You can’t miss it.”

  “Obliged,” said the tall horseman, and went that way.

  The two riders dismounted in front of the Glad Hand and went in, the tall one smiling a little in anticipation. He was a long, saddle-gaunt man with a narrow youthful face and salt-and-pepper gray hair; the strange combination made it impossible to judge his age. He had a big beaked nose and a narrow, triangular chin; the impression he gave was a little reptilian. His clothes were ordinary range clothes, his boots run down at the heels, his hat sweat stained. He looked like a lot of cowboys except for two things. He wore gloves, to protect his hands; and he wore two forty-four caliber Thuer Conversion Army Colt i revolvers in hip holsters, thonged down for saddle riding. No ordinary cowboy wore more than one six-gun; no ordinary cowboy wore gloves on a warm afternoon.

  He spotted Clarissa across the room. It was a long room, narrow, low of ceiling, with a polished bar running along the right-hand wall. The rest of the room was given over to a half dozen tables, a dance floor the size of a buckboard bed, and a little corner platform with an unattended upright piano. The walls were thick adobe, with small high tunnel-windows that admitted little light; lamps burned all around the room, though it was full daylight outside.

  Clarissa was willow-slim, a picture of grace, her face framed by the long soft fall of her dark hair; she was smiling at him when he came up to her.

  “Steve. Steve Lament.” She gave him her hand.

  With a gesture of gallantry remembered from somewhere back along the obscure years, the tall man removed his gloves before he took her hand and bowed over it. The attitude of his body, in spite of the cheap range clothes, gave him - in that brief moment of greeting - the unmistakable air of a Confederate cavalry officer. But the Confederacy was a long time gone.

  Steve Lament said, “You haven’t changed a hair. The most beautiful woman west of the Rio Grande.”

  “You always know the right thing to say,” she answered.

  “I heard you were here – couldn’t pass through without stopping to see you.”

  “I’m glad you did,” she said. “You’re full of dust – a drink on the house.”

  “Much obliged to you,” he said. “Meet my saddle partner, Miller.’’

  Clarissa nodded courteously to the squat man beside him. Miller’s lipless mouth opened and shut; he did not speak. Steve Lament said, “He doesn’t talk much, I’m afraid. We’re on our way south, got a job waiting in Mexico.”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” said Clarissa. “You look like a man who needs work.”

  “You can say that again,’’ Lament murmured, with a small twisted smile. “Isn’t this Jeremy Six’s town?”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Like to pay my respects before we move on.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t,” she said. “Not unless you can stay over a few days. Jeremy’s gone to Prescott – something about testifying at a trial in the Federal Court.”

  “Why, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Steve Lament. He was about to speak again when a heavy hand clapped him on the back and a roaring laugh thundered in the room:

  “Stevie, boy, how you makin’ it these days?”

  He wheeled, touching his gun – the gesture of a man on edge. Behind him stood an ox of a man with a flowing black moustache and the black-and-white clothes of an itinerant gambler – Jack Vermillion, bull of the gamblers’ circuit.

  Steve Lament spoke without warmth. “Evening, Jack.”

  “Surprised to see you way out here,” said Vermillion. “We don’t get too many of you riverboat boys out this far.”

  “Lot of water’s flowed down that river since the last time I saw it,” Steve Lament breathed. “You look fit, Jack.”

  “He ought to,” Clarissa said. “He’s been pushing a streak of luck at my tables for five straight days.”

  Jack Vermillion uttered a barking guffaw. He was a huge man of hearty appetites, red-cheeked, full-mouthed, round-bellied but he had shrewd small eyes set back under unruly sandy brows, eyes that gave away nothing, missed nothing, never joined in the meaty laughter of his mouth.

  Vermillion said, “Last time we sat down together, you took a thousand dollars in greenbacks away from me, Steve.”

  “You’ve got a long memory.”

  “I never forget a hand of cards,” said Vermillion, and meant it. “Like to have another crack at you if you’re willing.”

  “I’m traveling light,” said Lament. “My pockets have been fuller.”

  “What about your friend here?” Vermillion looked inquiringly at Miller.

  “He can talk for himself, if he’s a mind,” said Lament.

  Miller’s thin mouth peeled back from yellow teeth. “I might sit in for a hand or two if the lady serves food in this place. My belly thinks my throat’s been cut. Ain’t had a full meal since we left Denver.”

  “Denver,” Jack Vermillion mused. “A thousand miles – long way to come, unless a man had a reason.” He watched Steve Lament speculatively – never a man to let information pass when it might be useful.

  But Lament gave him no help. He only nodded to Clarissa.

  She said, “I can put up a bar supper, or send the swamper to the cafe for a steak.”

  “Steak sounds fine,” Miller said, and clamped his lipless mouth together.

  .... And so the card game began, Miller bucking Jack Vermillion, with a house dealer and two other poker players at the table. Steve Lament stayed aloof, standing at the bar with Clarissa. They talked old times: New Orleans, the river, paddlewheeler saloons, days of long-dead elegance, memories of crinoline and jasmine and fine cognac. Steve Lament brought Jeremy Six’s name into it after a while and
saw the way Clarissa’s face changed, and drew his own judgments from that; he said: “He feel about you the same way you feel about him?”

  “I think so,” she said quietly. “I think he does.” Her smile was small and bittersweet, her eyes faraway as if she were composing the man’s image in her mind.

  “You’d go well together,” Steve Lament remarked, his face momentarily dark with the thought of his own solitary life. “I envy Jeremy.”

  “Thank you, Steve.”

  “I didn’t mean that as flattery.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, Jeremy always had plenty of sand. There was never much doubt he’d make something of himself.”

  “You sound jaded,” she said.

  “I guess I am. You get to a point when you look down to see what you’ve gathered to you in the course of a lifetime, and you can get a little sour when you see all you’ve got is a fistful of ashes. It gets so you can’t stay in one place very long.”

  “I’m sorry, Steve.”

  His smile was crooked. “Yeah.” He shook his head slightly and mused, “Nothing much left for my kind any more, Clarissa. Jeremy did the smart thing, got off the circuit while he still had his guts inside him. I guess he makes this town a pretty good marshal.”

  “He’s the best.”

  “Uh-huh. He always did believe in that law stuff. Rules, regulations, right and wrong, good and bad. I guess I had most of that shot out of me in the war.”

  “The war was a good many years ago.”

  “You trying to tell me you’ve forgotten it? You, with a father who went broke on three-cent cotton with carpetbaggers living high on the hog all around him?”

  “You have to put things behind you,” she said.

  “I wish I could.” He brooded into the amber swirl of his drink. “I’m running out of places to go, you know that? Not much call for jobs with gun wages any more. The old free grass is getting fenced in. Railroads and barb wire. Not many wide-open boom camps left.”

  “Why don’t you settle down? Take a job, the way Jeremy has.”

  He laughed off-key. “Not for me, I’m afraid. You see, I just don’t believe in it. Nobody’s ever going to tie me up in a neat-wrapped package of regulations, twelve-hundred a year and fines, whatever he gets.”

  “He’s got a good life.”

  “For him. Not for me. I’m not built that way and I’m too old to change.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  He shrugged. “Like I told you, I’ve got a job down Mexico way. A little revolution brewing up down there.” Clarissa glanced toward the squat, uncommunicative man playing cards intently with Jack Vermillion. “With him … with Miller?”

  “Kind of an eyesore, isn’t he?” Lament said with a wry grin. “Well, they hired him and they hired me, and we were both headed the same way, and I was just too tired to care enough to tell him to pick his own trail. A man gets damned weary of traveling alone all the time.”

  He saw the troubled concern in Clarissa’s eyes; he avoided her glance and tossed down the rest of his drink, banging the empty glass on the bar with more force than was necessary. He said bitterly, “You know how it ends for folks like Miller and me? They find us one day out in the brush, a set of bones the buzzards left behind, no name left to bury us under. I hear they found Curly Bill Graham like that up Parker Canyon way a few months ago.”

  Clarissa said with studied calm, “You’re feeling sorry for yourself and I’m starting to run out of pity, Steve. If all you want is a sympathetic ear, you—”

  She didn’t get a chance to finish it; the room erupted. It all happened too fast to take it all in; he had glimpses, impressions. He never did find out what started it but evidently it started with an argument over cards – perhaps Miller accused Jack Vermillion of cheating, or the other way around. What slammed Steve Lament’s hard sudden attention around was the bull-roar of Jack Vermillion’s great voice and the clatter of a tumbling chair.

  Miller—whose first name Lament had never learned—was on his feet. The chair he had knocked back from under him had fallen over and was still sliding back away from him when Lament’s eyes shot around. Jack Vermillion’s right hand was dropping off the table, evidence he was reaching for a gun, and Miller’s thick hand was a claw curled around the handle of his own six-gun, tugging it out into play.

  Clarissa spoke one sharp word: “Billy!” And in response a big bald man at the end of the bar—clearly a bouncer—went ramming toward the table hefting a sawed-off pool cue. The bouncer roared, “Hold it!”

  His voice was strong enough to roll into the scene and distract the adversaries for a split moment. The bouncer thundered, “Outside – take it outside!”

  Clarissa said, “Cool off, boys.” She looked stem and calm, quite in control of herself.

  Steve Lament moved quickly forward; he had seen far too much senseless violence over meaningless card games. He had a stake in Miller s well-being, and nothing much against Vermillion; he saw no reason why they should be allowed to shoot each other without interference.

  “Miller,” he growled, “back off. You too, Jack.”

  But it was all too late. The guns roared.

  Vermillion s gun bucked and thundered. The first shot went wide but its concussion knocked out all the lamps except the most distant ones at the front of the room. In the sudden uncertain dimness, Miller opened fire. Lament, stopped in his tracks by the explosion of shooting, lifted his right-hand gun and held it poised, calling out in a loud bitter voice – calling for a halt. He saw men scrambling and scuttling to get out of the line of fire. Vermillion was a huge hulk, weaving on his feet, ducking and shooting; Miller, squat and fast, was down on one knee, bracing for a shot, and he was like that when Vermillion’s gun threw a slung into him just above the belt-buckle and knocked him down. Tumbling on his side, Miller kept shooting. The racket was earsplitting – forty-fives in an enclosed space. The acrid stink of cordite filled Lament’s nostrils; his shouting was hoarse and enraged.

  The bouncer had dropped his bung-starter and whipped out a nickelplate revolver. Miller’s slugs were flying wild; the man was gut-shot and no longer thinking, shooting by pure reflex. Lament caught the fragmentary glint of light racing along the nickelplate revolver and wheeled toward it just as the bouncer thumbed off a hasty shot at Miller. The shot flew wide of the mark, slicing across the outside of Steve Laments arm. Lament’s hand convulsed in reaction, setting off his own gun. Its orange lance of muzzle-flame stabbed toward the bouncer.

  Eyes wide in horror, Lament saw the bouncer swing the glittering gun up toward him - the bouncer thought Lament was shooting at him. The nickelplate gun steadied and Lament, shaking his head, still shouting, saw there was no choice left now. He fired twice, very fast in a rolling thunder of sound, his only purpose to still that bright-glinting gun in the bouncer s fist.

  The bouncer bent over as if he had been kicked in the belly; tipped off his feet and pitched to the floor.

  And behind the bouncer a slim shape, dim in the deep shadows, slid slowly down against the front of the bar.

  Lament swallowed in terror. God. Oh, Jesus God. He wheeled. Miller was on the floor, groveling, his legs jerking, his gun fallen away. Jack Vermillion was frowning, holding his fire. Smoke swirled in the darkness. The bouncer was motionless, plainly dead by the way he had fallen. Beyond the bouncer Clarissa lay, still and awkward, propped against the foot of the bar.

  Lament crossed the room in four long strides and bent by her. He laid his finger along the side of her throat to catch the pulse.

  After a moment he got very slowly to his feet and walked to the door. The crowd was still under cover, unsure, afraid it was not yet over. Lament went outside into the dying blaze of sundown and got on his horse. His hands were trembling. He jerked the horse’s head up and savagely neck-reined it around, spurred it to a dead run and ran south into the darkening desert.

  Two

  Guadalquivir sprawled across the hills, a baked o
ld town of adobe and tall palm trees. The Rio Soldado, which started somewhere back in the high timber of the Sierra Grande, flowed through the town on its curling way to the sea at Puerto Naco, another sixty miles to the south. Not so very far north lay the United States border, from which Jeremy Six had come horseback on this grim and determined journey. Southeast, many hundreds of miles, lay Mexico City, where Maximilian had been crushed so that Mexico might be Mexican. It was a land of great leaders like Juarez; it was also the land of the ruthless and bloody Cortez.

  Narrow dusty streets threaded past the crowded ’dobes. Ox-carts with big solid wheels creaked along the night-dark avenidas and fat women moved among them, carrying wooden yokes across their shoulders, laden with baskets and big clay jars. Splashes of yellow lamplight from doorways checkered the dusty central plaza; the music of a guitar drifted sadly out of the Cantina Monte.

  That was where Six drew rein and dismounted. In this country of squat men he looked notable: a tall gringo with a shield-shaped face and the long flat hips of a born horseman. An Arizona hat, flat-crowned and curl-brimmed, overhung his heavy brown brows; a belted Colt revolver hung at his hip in a holster that had seen a good deal of use; over his gray flannel shirt he wore a calfskin vest with two pinholes to mark the place where a lawman’s badge usually hung.

  South of the border now, he was out of his jurisdiction; down here he was Mister, not Marshal. But civilian status didn’t change the habits of years; a professional fighting man, Jeremy Six used his eyes and his ears and his intuitions at all times, and there wasn’t much he missed. He was keenly alert to the shadows of the alleys and streets that opened onto the square; though he wasn’t looking that way, he was fully aware of the shriveled man in white peon clothes who stood by the covered well in the center of the plaza. Chewing the narcotic coco leaf had made the peon old before his time; soon, senile at the age of thirty-five, he would die. The peon drank from the well and went away, and Jeremy Six knew all that without having looked at him more than once.