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  DARK TRAIL

  DARK TRAIL

  ED GORMAN

  M. EVANS

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by M. Evans

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1990 by Ed Gorman

  First paperback edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

  Gorman, Edward

  Dark trail / Ed Gorman.

  p. cm.—(An Evans novel of the West)

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3557.0759D3 1990 90-27628

  813’. 54—dc20

  ISBN: 978-1-59077-231-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-59077-232-4 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Peter Rabe: peace, my friend

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter One

  The cigarette had two or three good drags left and Leo Guild was happy to take them. A couple of minutes from now he was going to go bursting into the little frame farmhouse standing silver and shabby in the moonlight ten yards ahead of him. Probably there was at least one man in there guarding the prisoner with a shotgun. These might be the last drags of a cigarette Guild ever had in his life.

  “You scared, Leo?” The woman who asked this stood behind the same elm tree as Guild.

  “I suppose.”

  “That means you are.”

  “I am. Yes.”

  “You don’t have to do it.”

  Guild took the cigarette from his lips and exhaled. He was a tall man with white hair, a black Stetson, a black suit coat, boiled white shirt, gray serge trousers, and black Texas boots. A .44 was strapped around his waist.

  He smiled. “Nah, I don’t have to do it, do I?”

  “Don’t go and get sarcastic on me, Leo.”

  “I could just walk back to my horse and ride out of here and you wouldn’t care at all, would you, Sarah?”

  “Nothin’ bothers me as much as sarcasm. You know that, Leo.”

  Guild looked at her: the red hair, the soft pretty face, the slight but graceful body in the blue gingham dress. She wasn’t exactly city but she wasn’t exactly country, either. She was some fetching combination of both.

  “By rights,” Guild said, “I should shoot him myself when I get in there.”

  “It wasn’t his fault, Leo. It was mine.”

  “You always say that.”

  “He wasn’t the one who left you, Leo. I was.”

  “I didn’t hear him offer to return you.”

  “First of all, I’m not anybody’s property, Leo. And second of all—” She sighed, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “Second of all, I fell in love with Frank, Leo. I just couldn’t help it.”

  “Leaving me for a gunfighter sure doesn’t make any sense to me, Sarah.” His words were tinged with anger and pain.

  Now she smiled. He remembered her when she was a teenager, smiling that way. he felt things he didn’t want to feel. ‘That’s one thing I’ve noticed about being thirty-five.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Almost nothing makes sense. Least of all marrying a gunfighter, I suppose.” She looked at the farmhouse and smiled. “He’s the little boy I never had, Leo.”

  Guild was out of drags. No more stalling. He dropped the cigarette to the sandy dirt and stepped on it with the pointed toe of his boot. He stood for a minute looking around at the land. In the moonlight the flat farmland was all silver and shadow. On the tops of ripe autumn corn, dew shone like fire. A nighthawk glided past the round yellow moon. A barn owl hooted lonesomely. In the surrounding hills you could smell smoky October.

  “Well,” Guild said, taking his .44 from his holster.

  “You really don’t have to do this, Leo.”

  He looked at her and smiled again. “Right,” he said.

  Guild crouched down and went through the long buffalo grass up to the front porch. He moved leftward, still crouching, gun ready.

  Behind the lacy white curtains in the front window, he could see Sarah’s husband Frank tied to a straight-backed chair. He was carrying on a conversation with a fat man in a plaid shirt and dungarees that had slipped aways under his considerable belly. The man held a Remington repeater in his right hand though he wasn’t ready to fire it. It was just sort of dangling there from one of the man’s fingers. Frank was a sweet-talker, the bastard. Now he was sweet-talking one of the men who’d captured him.

  Guild couldn’t see anybody else inside. He moved around the side of the house to check the horses in back. Two mounts, one a roan, the other a dun. The roan was slapping hard at flies with his tail. Given the two horses, it was clear that it was just Frank and the fat guy inside.

  Guild went back around to the front of the house. Frank and the other guy were still talking. In fact, the other guy was grinning, as if Frank had just told him a funny story. That goddamn Frank. He’d always driven Guild crazy.

  Guild crept up on the porch, paused, lifted up his leg, kicked in the door, and went in firing.

  The air was loud with bullets ripping into the parlor wall and hazy with the choking clouds of gunsmoke.

  The fat guy thought about lifting up his Remington but Guild walked right over to him and put the .44 against his forehead.

  “Please,” Guild said. “I don’t have anything against you and I really don’t want to hurt you. You understand?”

  The fat guy nodded.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Frank Evans said.

  “Untie him,” Guild said to the fat guy.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

  “Now,” Guild said to the man who looked dazed by all that had happened in the last minute.

  The fat guy went over and untied Frank.

  Guild looked around. There was a plump black stove in the arch­way between parlor and kitchen, new rose paper on the walls, and two wire chairs and a settee in the east corner. This was a working man’s dream, cheap but new and clean.

  “Your place?” Guild asked the fat guy as he untied Frank.

  The fat guy, finishing, nodded.

  “Tell your wife she did a good job,” Guild said.

  The fat guy looked at him and shrugged. “Guess she’d probably appreciate that.”

  Frank stood up, rubbing his wrists. “I’ll be su
re and tell Mr. Ingram you did a good job, Karl. Goddamned near cut off my circulation.”

  At that, Karl kind of grinned. Then he obviously remembered what had just happened here. “He’s going to be pissed.”

  “I imagine so,” Frank said, collecting his gun, hat, and coat from the settee. Frank Evans was short, dark, handsome in a way that was not quite pretty, and moved with a gracefulness some men found suspicious.

  Frank nodded at the front door. “Sarah out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You hold him here while I go talk to her. I got a few things I need to say. All right?”

  Guild looked at him. He’d never liked the little bastard. Never. “You giving me any choice?”

  “Don’t go getting that way, Leo, for Christ’s sake,” Frank said.

  And with that, he was gone.

  Guild and Karl stood in an awkward silence. “Sears, Roebuck.”

  “Pardon?” Guild said.

  “Sears, Roebuck. That’s where the missus got the furniture and stuff.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll tell her what you said.”

  “Be sure to.”

  Karl kept staring at the .44 Guild held on him. “You his partner?”

  “Frank’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Frank doesn’t have a partner.”

  “Didn’t think so. How you know him then?”

  Guild looked at Karl, relishing the expression that he was about to put on Karl’s face. “He stole my wife,” Guild said.

  Karl looked at him and whistled. “He makes a lot of people mad, don’t he?”

  “He sure does.”

  “That’s why Mr. Ingram brought him out here and tied him up. He killed Mr. Ingram’s brother in a gunfight.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Mr. Ingram’s brother was a snake.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Mr. Ingram’s going to be pissed he didn’t get a chance to kill Frank.”

  Guild laughed. “So are a lot of people.”

  Chapter Two

  Five Years Later

  It was a river town of new brick buildings and buggies, saloons and honky-tonk pianos, and pretty women in bustles and big picture hats and men in the latest Edwardian fashions stepping proudly down the dusty board sidewalks. In their minds they probably dreamed that this was Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Tyler Street in Kansas City.

  Guild had been in town three weeks, living in a rooming house set beneath the sprawl of a vast tree aflame with color now that the temperature had cooled. Plump orange pumpkins had been set out on porches for Halloween a week hence.

  Guild had just finished two months of guarding ore wagons up in the mountains. There had been labor union trouble, and while Guild was sympathetic to the workers, they could be just as hard-ass as the mine owners. During this time he had developed a cough. That cough was still with him as he lay awake at the breakfast hour listening to the chatter of kids in the street below, headed noisily for school.

  Soon enough he’d have to start looking for work again. Good as the mine job had been, the money was mostly gone now. He didn’t live high, but this time he’d treated himself to new clothes and some dental work and more than a few nights in good restaurants, ones where they served wine in a glass, not a bottle, and big porterhouse steaks with big pats of butter melting down the sides. Sometime during all this he’d turned fifty-seven.

  He was recalling all this when there was a soft knock on the door. “Yes?”

  “Are you decent?” asked Mrs. Tomlin.

  “Some people don’t seem to think so.”

  “Oh, you. I meant do you have clothes on?”

  “Yes, I do,” Guild said. Mrs. Tomlin was a widow with a quick girly smile and Guild loved to tease her.

  She opened the door aways, then peeked her tiny gray head inside and saw him stretched out on the bed. “You feeling all right, Leo? Haven’t seen you sleep in this late.”

  Then he went and coughed, just exactly what he didn’t want to do around Mrs. Tomlin, because she was sure to give him a lecture.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve been coughing since you got here.”

  “I’m still fine.”

  “I worry about you, Leo.”

  “I know you do and I appreciate it.”

  “There’s breakfast left. And I’ll make you some fresh toast.”

  “That’s nice of you. But is that what you came up here to tell me?”

  She flushed. “I nearly forgot.” She reached in her apron and pulled out a white envelope. “This came.”

  “Isn’t it kind of early for the mail?”

  She shook her graying head. “Not the mail. A boy brought it over from the Skylark Hotel.”

  “I see.”

  She walked across the floor and handed it to Guild. As she did so, their eyes met. She was the kind of woman he liked, intelligent and purposeful but sweet, too. He took the letter.

  His name was written in blue ink on the front of the envelope. He recognized the hand immediately.

  He must have made a face because Mrs. Tomlin said, “Somebody you know?”

  “Yes. My former wife.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Tomlin sounded almost hurt for some reason. “I never knew you were married.”

  “For a while I was.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  He looked at her and smiled, realizing now that she was jealous. He found that oddly touching. “Not any prettier than you are, Mrs. Tomlin.”

  She laughed. “Aren’t you the devil-tongued one, though?”

  “It’s the truth, Mrs. Tomlin. You’re a fine-looking woman and you know it.”

  And then he went and spoiled this sweet moment by coughing.

  “You really should—” Mrs. Tomlin began.

  “See a doctor,” Guild finished for her, in between his racking hacks. Then he rolled off the bed and started pulling on his boots.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Tomlin.”

  She nodded and left, taking a sad final look at Leo bent over to his boots—a big melancholy man with blue eyes and hair very white in the small room’s bright autumn sunlight.

  There was a restaurant on the first floor of the hotel. It was filled with businessmen with their cigars, and proper ladies in their organdy dresses and bright paste jewelry.

  In the center of the large room Sarah Evans sat staring down at her small white hands. She looked as if she might be trying to levitate them.

  Guild got about the kinds of looks he’d expected from the men—a ruffian—and the ladies—an interesting if not exactly handsome man.

  Sarah didn’t glance up even when he reached the table. He pulled a chair out and sat down.

  He’d seen her this forlorn only once before in her life—the night she’d miscarried, the night they both knew she’d never have children, despite the reassuring words of the doctor.

  “Hello,” Guild said.

  And finally she looked up. “Hi, Leo.”

  “You look pretty bad.”

  “I feel pretty bad.”

  “What happened?”

  “Frank.”

  “I figured.”

  “He’s got this girlfriend.”

  “You two still married?”

  She nodded. She seemed about to cry.

  “That son of a bitch. The next time I see him I’m going to punch his nose in and don’t goddamn try and stop me.”

  She laughed sadly. “The way I feel right now, I won’t try to stop you, believe me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Up in his room on the fourth floor.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A few nights ago.”

  “The last time I saw you two, you seemed reasonably happy.”

  “The farmhouse that night. You went in and got him from Karl.”

  “Right.”

  She shrugged. “Things were pretty good after
that. He was pretty scared that night, even if he didn’t let on.” Her gaze drifted back to her sweet, small hands. “Then he went back to being Frank.”

  The waitress came. They got another pot of coffee—she’d already polished one off all by herself—and Guild got a piece of toast. The older he got, the hungrier he got. It didn’t make any sense.

  “Who is she?” Guild said. “His usual?”

  “She’s pretty, if that’s what you mean, and she’s got a very fancy body.”

  “You still in love with him?”

  “I guess so.”

  “How many times’ve you let him do this to you?”

  She shrugged again. “Maybe ten.”

  The waitress came with the coffee and the toast, filled their cups, and left.

  “She’s Ben Rittenauer’s girl.”

  “The gunnie?”

  She nodded.

  Guild whistled. “Maybe Frank’s finally going to get what’s coming to him.” He saw that his remark had scared her. He put his big hand on her small one. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  She started to cry. Nothing dramatic, just silver tears in the corner of her blue eyes. She looked, just then, old and sad, and Guild remembered how much he used to love her and how scared she could get sometimes and for no good reason at all. Sometimes he felt more like her father than anything else; and many times she acted as if Frank were her son.

  “Frank’ll be all right,” Guild said. “He always is.”

  “He deliberately took her from Rittenauer to make him mad.” She shook her head. Her hair was gray-streaked these days. “He got tired of people telling him that Rittenauer was going to kill him someday.”

  “If they ever get into it, Rittenauer will kill him,” Guild said.

  She looked at him and said, “Not according to Frank he won’t.”

  Then she smiled sadly again. “You know what’s going on here? Frank’s almost forty. He’s afraid women don’t find him appealing any more and he’s afraid men aren’t afraid of him. Taking Rittenauer’s girl helps him out both ways. He’s betting Rittenauer won’t call him on this.”

  “She must be some girl to let herself be picked off this way.”

  This time Sarah reached across and touched Guild’s hand. “Sort of the way Frank picked me off. Me leaving you for him and all?”