According to Hoyle Page 3

  “You know about Fort Robinson and the Indians, don’t you Frank?” Stringer asked in a whisper.

  Alvarado shook his head jerkily as he continued to watch the soldiers below. His teeth were chattering.

  “Three years ago, there was this Cheyenne Chief named Dull Knife got captured near Fort Robinson and held there. He’d tried to escape with his band of Indians and been massacred, and that was the end of the Indian Wars in the Nebraska Territory.”

  “How you know this, Cap?”

  Stringer shrugged. He hadn’t known a lot about the Cheyenne or the Lakota Sioux at the time, and like most in the country, he hadn’t cared when he’d heard news about the mass death. But then he’d met John C. Baird in Denver a month ago, who’d told him quite a tale.

  “They called Dull Knife an admirable outlaw, whatever that is,” Stringer continued. Alvarado gave him a confused frown.

  “He hid tribal valuables in the clothes and ornaments of his people as they ran from the Federal troops through the Nebraska badlands. Even their guns got dismantled, hidden in blankets and parts of beads and jewelry.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Stringer admitted. The Cheyenne had been poor, starving, and desperate by the time they’d reached the badlands. Most of the ceremonial trinkets and ancient baubles considered sacred by the elders weren’t of any interest to the soldiers who chased them. “Didn’t help them much when the cold caught up to them.”

  Dull Knife, the ill-fated leader of the Cheyenne who’d tried to return to their ancient homeland, had been among the first to be buried, put in the ground atop the very ridge the soldiers now searched, his grave lost to the shifting winds of the badlands. And with it, the goods that had been buried with him to keep them safe.

  “What’s that got to do with us?” Alvarado finally asked hesitantly.

  “Well, Frank,” Stringer said with a small, cruel smile. “They say after he was buried, the Rosebud Creek started running with gold.”

  “Gold?” Alvarado repeated with a dubious lift to his eyebrow.

  “Gold.”

  Alvarado stared at him for a moment, then turned his pale eyes back to the dozens of soldiers laboring below them. “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither,” Stringer told him softly. “I don’t believe in magic or no Indian hogwash. All I know is that government man wants whatever these boys dig up, and he wants it bad. Our job is to get it for him.”

  “If you say so, Cap.”

  Stringer’s men were growing restless. He could occasionally hear the snort of a horse or the cough of a man as they waited behind the ridge amidst the cover of the ponderosa.

  They might not be getting a river running with precious ore, and Stringer didn’t believe whatever the Cheyenne had buried with Dull Knife had the power to turn anything into gold. But what the government man meant to pay them for whatever the soldiers pulled out of the earth would be worth the wait.

  “Mr. Baird, I trust your end of this issue has been taken care of?” the old man rasped.

  “I’m afraid there were some complications,” Baird reported. “Stringer is well on his way, but Rose refused to work with us. He then escaped before we could dispatch him.”

  “Escaped.”

  “Yes, sir. Escaped.”

  “How?”

  “Pure luck, I assure you, sir. An earthquake, in fact.”

  “An act of God,” the old man said in his disconcerting voice. He raised his spotted hand to scratch at his eyebrow. The gold and jewels of the rings on his fingers reflected the light in odd patterns.

  Baird fought not to be distracted by it. The silence fell heavy in the room. Dust motes floated by his head in the shaft of light let in by the frosted window. Baird waited for the old man to continue.

  “Very well. Can his knowledge harm us? Harm our plan?”

  “Certainly, if ever he were to find all the pieces.” Baird knew better than to hedge his answers. The truth and only the truth was the thing to give to his employer.

  “Will he?”

  “He couldn’t possibly, sir.”

  “You believe a man who would be so lucky as to stumble upon an earthquake when one is needed could not possibly have the good fortune to piece together this puzzle you have so artfully taken apart?”

  Baird pressed his lips tightly together to hide his frustration. “Point well made, sir. What would you have me do?”

  “Kill him.”

  “It’s already in the works, sir.” Baird had hired two men to track Rose down and dispatch him. The last telegram he’d received had put them somewhere in Nebraska. Baird was confident Rose would find no earthquakes there.

  “And Stringer?” the old man asked without acknowledging Baird’s forethought.

  “He is quite capable. I have given him the bare bones of our orders and he assures me it will be done.”

  The old man’s thin white hair flew in wisps around his head and his eyebrows seemed to weigh down the skin of his forehead, giving the impression he was constantly scowling. When he offered his snaggletooth grin, he appeared quite ghastly.

  Baird smiled politely. He knew how this game was played. He’d begun his lengthy career as a Pinkerton agent during the War Between the States. He and others like him had acted as spies for the Union army, repeatedly going behind enemy lines to do the bidding of those with higher rank.

  Baird had risen quickly. After the war, when the Secret Service department had been formed to help handle the workload of the US Marshals, Baird had been one of the first ones to be recruited. On the surface, the Secret Service were involved with suppressing the counterfeiting of paper money, which had become popular since the currency of the failed Confederacy so many people had hoarded lost its value. But their reach extended much further than that; though they still performed the duties that had been their beginning, now they were also tasked with protecting government officials at certain times, and more importantly, they still acted as spies for the government, on both native and foreign soil.

  Baird did not like farming out jobs to untrustworthy and unpredictable outlaws. If they failed, it would be on his head.

  “And the information you intended to harvest from Rose. Where do you intend to get it now?” the old man asked.

  Baird had no good answer for that. Men who’d spent time peacefully with the tribes were few and far between. “I’m still seeking an answer to that, sir.”

  “Very well. Inform me at once when you hear of any news.”

  “Yes, sir,” Baird answered as he stood and tipped his head. “A good day to you, General.”

  “John,” the general called after him as he turned to take his leave. “You may see fit to make certain your loose ends are tied. If Rose shows his face in New York, you had better not show yours.”

  Baird’s polite smile faltered only slightly. “Yes, General,” he said obediently, cursing under his breath as the heavy door shut behind him.

  The creak of the wagon wheels and the clop of the horses’ hooves were the lone sounds that broke the late evening silence as Wash and Flynn traveled south to Junction City. Before setting out the previous evening, they had deputized an extra man they could trust to stay back in Lincoln and hold down the fort until one of the other marshals returned.

  They expected to get into Junction City well before nightfall of their second day of trekking, but both men were veterans of plains travel, and knew how unpredictable it could be. They had given themselves plenty of leeway. The only problem with leeway was when you didn’t need it. Even with someone to keep you company on the trail, the silence could be oppressive at times.

  “Know anything about these boys?” Flynn finally asked to break up the monotony.

  Wash glanced over at him. He was guiding the cumbersome wagon over the deeply rutted trail with one hand as if it were easy. “Two of them are soldiers of some description,” he answered around the blade of grass between his teeth. When the dry-goods store had burned down, the town�
�s tobacco had gone with it. All the men who smoked for a fifty-mile radius had taken to chewing straw as a poor replacement until the new shipments came up the river. Wash claimed Lincoln had been witness to some very cranky town meetings in the meantime.

  Flynn pondered telling Wash that he had bought more tobacco while up in Stillwater, but decided against it.

  “Soldiers. Indian Wars? Or War Between the States?” he asked dubiously. Surely they weren’t still tracking down deserters and dissenters from the latter.

  Wash shrugged and clucked his tongue at the plodding mule pulling the wagon. “I don’t think these gentlemen are deserters. I think they’re younger. Regular Army, Indian Wars and all that.”

  “Huh. What’d they do?”

  “Telegrams didn’t say.”

  Flynn hummed. Not many soldiers got sent back for trial and hanging. The Army needed the numbers and the guns while fighting the Indians, so for the most part they didn’t care about their behavior. And if it was something truly heinous, they were usually taken care of on site, before the bureaucrats got hold of it. These boys must have done something particularly interesting to be sent to Fort Smith. Of course, the Ute and Cheyenne wars had ended almost two years ago, and things had been pretty quiet since. Flynn remembered how soldiers could find trouble during peacetime.

  These two unfortunates might be examples to keep order.

  Flynn never really gave much thought to what their prisoners had done. He took them where they were supposed to go and then went on with life. He claimed that it was hard to watch a man you’d conversed with hang from the gallows, which it was, but it was also easier to not give a damn about the outlaws they met.

  Some of them deserved a noose. Some did not.

  “The third is a shootist,” Wash continued. “You might’ve heard of him. Goes by the name of Dusty Rose.”

  “No kidding?” Flynn said with long look over at Wash. “I have heard of him.”

  “Everyone’s heard of him,” Wash said with a laugh. “He’s in all those damn dime novels they sell back East.”

  “Dime novels,” Flynn scoffed. “They never get anything right.”

  Those damn stories made more trouble for people than most anything. If you were unlucky enough to get your name in a dime novel, it was likely you’d have wet-behind-the-ears young guns coming after you from all sides, hoping to make themselves a name by getting the drop on you. Or worse, calling you out across a town square, thinking they were Wild Bill Hickok in Harper’s magazine. Flynn shook his head, glad that he and Wash both had managed to escape the fate of fame in their wilder youth.

  Dusty Rose had not been so lucky.

  Flynn hated dealing with rumor. He couldn’t help himself when it came to Dusty Rose, though, because the man kind of fascinated him. “They say he’s just as fast as Doc Holliday. I heard he dealt faro with Doc out in Colorado for a spell.”

  Wash laughed softly. It was a low, growling sound that always made Flynn smile. “You curious?”

  Flynn glanced back at him and slowed his horse, coming abreast of Wash as the man grinned at him.

  Wash looped the reins of the wagon around the toe of his boot and reached into his jacket with his good hand. He extracted a dime novel and offered it to Flynn. “Picked it up at the general store before we left.”

  Flynn rolled his eyes and snatched the flimsy story papers from him. Of course a new shipment of dime novels would come in before the tobacco. He pursed his lips, reading the title with a frown. “Best of the West Series: Dusty Rose, the Desert Flower.”

  On the front was a sketch of what the publishers figured Rose looked like. Flynn had found that they were never as handsome or as dashing as the public thought. And they were rarely ever as skilled or heroic. Most were just two-bit horse thieves with catchy names and a knack for dramatics.

  “Says he can shoot with either hand,” Wash told him as Flynn opened the book and scanned it with morbid curiosity. “Says he’s got a dog he trained to take keys out of a man’s belt, follows him everywhere he goes. Says he’s a bit of a dandy and that he don’t drink one lick. Never gambles, never swears, never goes a day without bathing. Can’t all be true if he was dealing faro with Doc Holliday. Not if he lived to see the first sunrise after.”

  “‘Always to be found in dapper dress,’” Flynn read with distaste. “‘Never a gold button or silk kerchief out of place.’”

  “‘Nary a damsel in distress or blushing maid can resist his smiling face,’” Wash recited, his voice shaking with laughter.

  Flynn grunted and tossed the dime novel over his shoulder. It landed with a plop in the back of the empty wagon. Wash guffawed raucously, obviously having expected the reaction.

  “I wouldn’t put too much stock in it,” Wash said after a while, still snickering. “Kid Antrim down in New Mexico was said to be a dandy too, and you’ve seen those tintypes of him. Ugly, dirty, little bastard.”

  “Lots of things was said about Kid Antrim. He’s a damn hero now that he’s dead and not shooting folks left and right. They’ll never call him a hired killer like he really was.”

  “What is it they’re calling him back East now? Billy the Kid?” Wash asked.

  Flynn offered that a rude noise. “That’ll never stick.”

  Wash shook his head, smiling as he pulled the mule to the right to avoid a rut that probably would have broken an axle. Flynn watched him as they plodded along, feeling the ache in his chest like he always did when he got a chance to sit back and watch his friend. It was a familiar ache, one that he had lived with since their early days in the Union Army.

  “Dime novels never get it straight,” Flynn said when the ache became too much to deal with. “I heard that Rose favors the gentlemen over the ‘blushing maids,’ or whatever the hell they called ’em. Wouldn’t that shock the genteel society types?” he mused.

  “I’ve heard that too,” Wash agreed. “Might shock the society types, but it ain’t uncommon out here. I do wonder how Rose gets by with it being so well-known.”

  Flynn grunted distractedly.

  “That bother you?”

  Flynn glanced back at him in surprise and then shrugged uncomfortably. Something about Wash’s tone of voice told him that he may have offended him with the subject. “Man’s welcome to do what he likes, so long as it don’t hurt no one else. I thought Rose was all bluster,” he added, irritably shifting his body in the saddle, hoping to change the subject. “All tenderfoot hooey and big talk about how fast he was with iron. Finally turned real outlaw, did he?”

  “Word is he killed a man,” Wash answered, giving a lopsided shrug. “Two men, actually.”

  “Word is he’s killed lots of people,” Flynn countered. “I thought it was all bull.”

  “Well, the dime novel stuff is bull. But the official reports ain’t too pretty. He’s been tried twice in New York, was absolved of guilt and let loose both times. Some say his family has big political pull, lots of money,” Wash said with another tug on the reins. “But he had to go west after the second trial to save his family’s name. Got into more trouble out here. He escaped from a sheriff in Arkansas somewheres, but after the fact it was proved he wasn’t even in town when the man he was accused of killing was shot, so they let him be.”

  “Escaped, huh?” Flynn asked, frowning heavily.

  “Seems to be pretty good at it. He’s been found innocent of four separate murder charges.” Wash grimaced as if the thought of someone getting away with murder caused him physical pain. “They were all self-defense incidents with witnesses and sworn statements and the like. But, rumor has it that in other cases he’s escaped from five different lawmen in three territories before ever being brought in front of a magistrate or judge.”

  “Five,” Flynn repeated flatly.

  Wash gave a jerk of his chin. “We’ll have our hands full.”

  “Well, ain’t that just a treat. I ain’t ever hearing ‘easy one’ from you again, you damn liar,” Flynn muttered. “So, wha
t makes this time any different? With the murder, I mean.”

  Wash shrugged. “Nothing special about it, I don’t think. He shot two boys in the street, neither of them yet twenty, then he stuck around until the sheriff showed up, claimed the other men drew first. I guess he was counting on the self-defense thing again. Local magistrate ain’t gonna be around for another month and they’re worried about him escaping, so he’s being sent off to New Orleans for trial.”

  “Huh.” Flynn glanced up at the darkening sky. “He stuck around.”

  “Yep.”

  “Peculiar.”

  “Yep.”

  “That his real name, y’think? Rose?” Flynn asked after a long moment of nothing but the creaking wagon wheels and the clopping hooves. “Dusty sure as sin ain’t his given name.”

  “Nah, it’s an alias,” Wash said with a small laugh. “I’m sure there’s another name on the papers.”

  “Guess we’ll find out soon enough, huh?” Flynn said as the squat gray buildings of Junction City came into view over the horizon.

  “Yep.”

  “Yep,” the old Junction City sheriff greeted drolly. He took the papers Wash handed him. “Yep, yep, yep.”

  “Good to know we’re in the right place,” Wash responded, giving Flynn an amused glance and a wink.

  Flynn rolled his eyes and then peered up and down the street warily. A smattering of people had gathered as they’d guided the wagon into town, recognizing them as lawmen and obviously aware of who they had come for. Flynn hadn’t quite appreciated the fuss this infamous prisoner might cause them as they took him toward the Mississippi. They would have to stay far away from the bigger towns along the route, where word might have already spread. It would make the trip longer, more expensive, and certainly more dangerous.

  Flynn’s horse shook its head and snorted, sidestepping toward the water trough as Flynn and Wash strode up onto the wooden sidewalk. They followed the sheriff into the tiny jail. It was dark and cramped and dusty. A typical territorial sheriff’s jail, as far as Flynn’s vast experience went, built out of mud brick and luck.