Clay Nash 21 Read online

  “Light ’em, Pa?” he called.

  Old Man Jarvess nodded, then stomped on the roof of the express car.

  “You in there. You got one chance to come up with your hands in the air. You do it an’ we’ll let you walk away. You make us come in after you an’ there’ll be no quarter.”

  “Go to hell, you son of a bitch,” a voice called from inside the car. “We can sit you out. You can’t bust in an’ we got food an’ water an’ ammunition an’ there’ll be another train along in a day or so. All we gotta do is wait. But, if I was you, mister, I wouldn’t stick around for that other train.”

  “Okay. That was your chance. Too bad. For you.”

  Old Man Jarvess nodded to his sons as they handed up the blazing tarpots. Filthy, choking black smoke and flames were already streaming from them as the other outlaws placed them on the roof.

  Jarvess gave the signal and they were dropped through the air scoops into the car.

  The robbers laughed as they heard the startled, choked cries of the Wells Fargo men. Glass shattered as a man tried to hurl a blazing pot out but the iron bars were too narrow. The size of the can had been deliberately chosen ...

  Tag Jarvess chuckled. “Won’t take ’em long to figure that the only way they’re gonna get them tarpots out is by openin’ that steel-lined door.” He tugged down his mask and casually began to build a cigarette as he watched the clouds of suffocating black smoke pouring out of the express car.

  It streamed from the broken windows and the air scoops, between cracks in the planks, around the steel-lined door and through a small screen vent into the guard’s caboose.

  The outlaws waited on the roof with cocked guns, watching the platform, waiting for the steel door to burst open and the four guards to come out ...

  There was pandemonium inside the car as the guards coughed and hawked and choked and stumbled blindly about in the dense smoke. A man started to scream hoarsely to get the lousy door open. Another made terrible, croaking sounds and the men outside knew someone was suffocating and that it was likely too late for him to be saved.

  It was only a matter of time.

  But when the guards finally came out, they almost caught the outlaws unawares. If Tag hadn’t dropped his half-smoked cigarette and stooped to picked it up, he might not have seen the guards stumbling out through a trapdoor in the floor, that the outlaws hadn’t known was there.

  “Look out! They’re underneath!” he bawled, dragging iron as he threw himself sideways and shooting wildly.

  Chet had his Colt out and working, kneeling down as the choking guards came staggering out, shooting, although half blinded. Their bullets raked the sandstone walls of the cutting, and one burned across Tag’s cheek, laying it open to the bone. He fanned his six-gun and blazed three shots into the guard who had winged him. Chet dropped flat as a shotgun thundered and a charge of buckshot screamed overhead.

  His hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  Old Man Jarvess and his other men were waiting with cocked guns and, as two of the Wells Fargo men appeared through the smoke, they were cut down in a merciless hail of lead Their bodies jerked and twisted as the bullets tore through them.

  They fell like bundles of bloody rags beside the tracks.

  “One more yet,” called the Old Man.

  “Think he’s dead, Pa,” Tag called. “Heard someone givin’ a death rattle inside.”

  “Go in easy then, son,” cautioned the Old Man as he started to climb down with the other men.

  Tag and Chet went in on their bellies, and found the body of the dead guard a few feet inside, just beneath a broken window, one hand clawed up towards the sill as if he had tried desperately to pull himself up for one last gulp of fresh air.

  The two outlaws kicked out the tarpots and the others hurled them down the track. Tag and Chet stumbled out of the car, coughing, choking, and wiping their streaming eyes.

  “Judas! I dunno how they stood that smoke for so long,” grated Chet hoarsely.

  “Give it time to clear,” the Old Man said, and turned to two of the others. “Mac, you an’ Tyler go find a sledge someplace an’ start work on that couplin’. Wyatt an’ Marlowe, go make sure that loco’s got plenty of steam an’ get ready to start her up when we signal.”

  One man, McGovern, wiping his bearded face with his crumpled bandanna mask, hesitated. “An’ what does the Jarvess family aim to do?”

  “We’ll check out the car when the smoke clears,” Old Man Jarvess told him.

  McGovern and Wyatt exchanged a swift glance. Tyler frowned and Marlowe, a clean-shaven, good-looking young outlaw, scrubbed a hand around his smooth jowls, looking thoughtful.

  “What’s wrong?” grated Chet Jarvess belligerently.

  “Well—how we gonna know for sure how much is in that there car?” asked Tyler, a redheaded man with a scar pulling down the left corner of his mouth. “You might tell us there’s six express bags—when there might be ten.”

  “Dangerous talk, Ty,” warned Old Man Jarvess quietly. “But I see your point. You fellers ain’t been with us long enough it seems to trust us. Okay. Ty, you stay here with Chet an’ me. Tag, you go with Mac an’ get the loco ready for rollin’.”

  Tag nodded, his thin mouth tight, and his eyes cold as he jerked his head at the tall, black-haired McGovern and together they moved towards the front of the train. The others set about looking for a sledge hammer in the engineer’s box under the wood tender.

  Chet Jarvess glared at the redhead. “You got no call to think we’d double-cross you, Ty.”

  Tyler shrugged, clutching his rifle, and alert for any trouble. He ran his tongue over his lips.

  “I hear you’re a close kinda family. I was told to—watch you.”

  “By hell, you take some risks, mister,” Old Man Jarvess said, his silver beard jutting from his square jaw. He opened his dustcoat and thrust a thumb into his gunbelt above the butt of his holstered Colt, and smiled thinly as Tyler stiffened.

  “Relax, you suspicious son of a bitch. I told you an’ your pards you’d share in this robbery an’ you’ll get what I promised. Sure, I look after my boys first an’ foremost, but you’ll find a Jarvess don’t go back on his word.”

  “Wouldn’t pay,” Tyler said quietly.

  “Listen,” Chet gritted, dropping a hand to his gun butt. But he froze as his father signaled him to calm down.

  “Hell, we pulled it off, didn’t we? Let’s go see what’s in that van. If there’s half as much as they told me, we ought to be set for quite a spell.” He gestured towards the steps leading to the platform. “You first, Ty, so’s you’ll get a look at exactly how many express bags there be.”

  Tyler hesitated, then shook his head. “Let Chet go first. I’ll follow.”

  The Old Man grinned crookedly and Chet laughed, leapt up the steps and, holding a kerchief over his mouth and nose, floundered into the smoke-filled car.

  The sledge began clanking as Wyatt and Marlowe started driving out the locking pin in the coupling.

  “Chet, make sure that brake wheel’s tight in the caboose, huh?” the Old Man said as he eased his way into the express car behind Tyler.

  The man in front cursed. “Hell almighty! Look at this. There’s only one express box. An’ it’s iron.”

  “Likely the bags are inside it,” Old Man Jarvess said as Chet went out to check the brake wheel.

  Tyler knelt beside the box. “We been gypped. This box ain’t even got a lock on it. Leastways, not a padlock. Look at it.”

  Frowning, Jarvess knelt and waved his hand in front of his seamed face to clear away a pall of dark, pungent smoke. He whistled softly through his teeth as he saw that the box had a numbered dial set onto reinforced plates welded to the front.

  “Judas! I got a bum steer all right. I was told they was carryin’ the gold an’ cash in the canvas bags.”

  “Well, if they are, they must be inside this goddamn casket.” Tyler kicked the heavy iron box and cursed as he hurt his foo
t. “Must be half an inch thick. An’ I never seen one of them kinds of locks before.”

  “No. They’re new from the East. Combination locks they call ’em. Lot of banks are startin’ to use ’em. You got to know the right combination of numbers an’ right-or-left turns or you can’t get ’em open.”

  “We could be here till Doomsday.”

  Jarvess shook his head. “Nope. We’ll just roll the car downgrade a little further than we intended. Then off-load closer to the area I figure to stash the loot.”

  “An’ which you ain’t told us about yet,” Tyler said, but went on swiftly. “How much further you aim to roll this here car? We was only gonna roll her back to where we got the mounts tethered ...”

  “We’ll need to go way past that point now. We’ll set the loco with wide-open throttle an’ let ’er go over the other side of the grade. She might jump the rails or she might hit the flats and burn herself out in the middle of the plains. Don’t matter to us. With the bodies loaded aboard, whoever finds the train’ll figure the robbery took place wherever it’s stopped. It’ll be a long ways from here. An’ so’ll we.”

  “Well, how damn far do we have to ride this thing back down the mountain?”

  “Far as she’ll roll. I want her close as possible to Morgan’s Bridge over the river. That damn chest is mighty heavy and it’s gonna take a lot of manhandling to the cache.”

  “Dynamite the bastard here an’ let’s go our separate ways,” Tyler growled.

  Jarvess gave him a hard look as Chet came back in and said he’d set the brake in the caboose.

  “Dynamite always burns up the paper money and there’s s’posed to be a lot of that on this shipment,” Old Man Jarvess told Tyler. “Nope. We’ll stash the chest, let things cool for a coupla weeks, then go back an’ get it an’ start work on her. By that time, I might’ve found out the combination for the lock.”

  “How?” Tyler scoffed.

  “We got our contacts, Tyler,” snapped Chet Jarvess. “You better start watchin’ your mouth, feller. I’m gettin’ a bellyful of you.”

  “Likewise,” Tyler snarled, but Old Man Jarvess got between them and pushed them apart.

  “Shut up the both of you. Chet, go give Tag the signal to get the loco on its way soon as Marlowe’s got it uncoupled. Then we’ll ride this here car downgrade an’ you an’ Wyatt can drop off where the mounts are waitin’, an’ meet us down at Morgan’s Bridge. We ought to’ve stopped by then.” He winked at his son so that Tyler couldn’t see. “Less the car’s brake’s fail, of course, in which case we’ll likely hit that bridge so fast we’ll tear up the track an’ take us a swim in the river.”

  Tyler paled. “Uh—I’ll go pick up the mounts,” he said quietly.

  “Sure, if you want,” Chet said, shrugging, keeping a deadpan face. “You and Wyatt can do it.”

  The redhead frowned, started to speak, but changed his mind as Chet left the car.

  Old Man Jarvess squatted in front of the steel express box, studying the combination lock ...

  Chapter Three – Distrust

  “Hell, Jim, I hate to give up even if we were lucky enough to recover the gold,” said Clay Nash. He was standing in the Cannon Creek office of the Wells Fargo Depot, looking across the desk at Chief of Detectives, James Hume.

  The blocky man in the Prince Albert coat and high, stiff collar, pierced and lit his long black cigar before answering. He puffed smoke and gazed at his top agent.

  “I know you’ve got a personal stake in nailing Cody Mann, Clay ...”

  “Damn right I have,” Nash said, rubbing gently behind his right ear. “I still got a lousy knot there an’ it’s been two weeks.”

  Hume held up a hand, nodding understandingly. “Sure, sure, I know,” he said a trifle curtly. “Cody pulled a dirty trick on you and you aim to get back at him by pulling him in. Well, like you say, we’ve recovered Jacob Handy’s gold. You were lucky you found Cody’s mount washed up in that canyon. But, fact is, we do have it and I’ve calmed Jacob Handy down so he’s not pressing the company for damages and the like.”

  Nash looked ruefully at Hume. “Maybe I ought to press the company for damages.”

  Hume’s mouth twitched briefly at one corner. It could have been a faint smile. “Reckon you know how much hope you got of succeeding. Lumps go with the job, Clay. But, seriously, Cody Mann’s no longer important ...”

  “The hell he ain’t.”

  “Not to Wells Fargo, he isn’t,” Hume said firmly. “Sure, we’ll keep him on our lists and we won’t close the books on him till we nab him. Sometime. He didn’t kill anyone, or even hurt ’em much—”

  Nash snorted derisively.

  “ ... And we got back all the gold dust. Let’s forget Cody for a spell. You just got in from the wilderness or you’d know we’ve got more trouble than you could shake a stick at.”

  Nash flopped into a chair, frowning. He should have known Hume wouldn’t be in Cannon Creek without there being something big in the wind. But he was so riled about the dirty trick that Cody Mann had pulled on him, that he’d been blind to everything else. Well, as Hume said, he’d better forget about Cody Mann. For now. But not entirely. The day of reckoning would come.

  Clay Nash simply couldn’t allow an outlaw like Cody Mann to get away with making a fool of him ...

  “We think the Jarvess bunch has hit one of our express cars on the train bound for Plainsville,” Hume said abruptly, jerking Nash out of his thoughts.

  “Jarvess? Kind of outside of their bailiwick ain’t it? They usually operate down round Santa Fe and points south.”

  “Right. But they know this neck of the woods mighty well. I checked my files. Old Man Jarvess grew up here. He reared his boys here, before cuttin’ loose an’ takin’ to the outlaw trail.”

  Nash nodded, not surprised at the display of knowledge. For Hume was one of the first detectives in the United States to keep extensive files on criminals and their backgrounds.

  He even helped pioneer the science of ballistics which was in its infancy at that period but which he had used impressively to convict three stagecoach robbers and killers.

  “He’s been around a long time, Old Man Jarvess,” said Nash.

  Hume nodded, drawing deeply on his cigar. “Too damn long as far as Wells Fargo’s concerned. He’s cost us thousands over the years. Always has an inside line. Like this time. Not many men knew we were shipping gold and paper currency through Plainsville to the new bank at Amarillo. But Jarvess got wind of it somehow and hit that train in a cutting just this side of the Texas Border.”

  “How’d he stop it?”

  “Well, he tried to make it look as if the robbery had taken place miles away from the cutting—He set the loco going across the plains with a jammed throttle and a full head of steam. But things went wrong for him. There must’ve been more steam up than he figured, ’cause the train rolled clear into Plainsville. It tore up half a mile of track an’ wrecked the depot before it stopped.”

  Nash whistled.

  “It carried a load of dead men—but no express car.”

  Nash frowned.

  “That’s right. It was what gave Jarvess away. He must’ve uncoupled it and rolled it away. But that needed a grade. And the only grade big enough was one at a cutting on the range. At the cutting, we found tarpots and blood and cigarette butts on top of the walls where they’d waited for the train to show.”

  Clay Nash nodded and began to build himself a cigarette.

  “It would’ve been goin’ at a snail’s pace so they just stepped off the cutting onto the express car, dropped the tarpots inside and waited for the guards to come out.”

  “More or less. They killed all the guards and the train crew as well. It had all the marks of a Jarvess deal—especially the tarpot thing. He pulled that six months ago when he hit the Santa Fe-Topeka pay train. Slaughtered everyone, too.”

  “Ornery cuss, Old Man Jarvess,” Nash said.

  “Kind of twisted,” Hume al
lowed. “Posse of lawmen figured he and his two sons had been behind some rustling years ago. They rode in on the spread when only Mrs. Jarvess and the young daughter was there. They were drunk and they tortured and raped the women. Both died. Old Man Jarvess with his boys rode into town and burned it to the ground. Then they wiped out the whole damn posse.” He paused. “I reckon they ain’t had respect for any kinda law since.”

  Nash was silent as he lit his cigarette. Hume reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper. He handed it to his operative.

  “Here’s a list of the men who knew about that shipment. You’ll see I’ve got a cross beside a name of the schedule clerk, Mathers. He’s from around these parts and he worked for Santa Fe-Topeka till a few months ago. He’s managed to buy himself a small ranch out of town and stock up with a good beef herd. Could be worth looking into.”

  Nash nodded. “Pay-off from Jarvess for info on the train, you reckon?”

  “Possible. The others seem okay but check them out anyway. I’ll get some men into the field—but we haven’t even found the express car yet.”

  “Hell, it couldn’t just vanish, Jim.”

  “It’s only been a day. My guess is Jarvess ran it off Morgan’s Bridge into the river. The bridge was washed away in the flood after all that rain. River won’t go down for days so that gives them a good start.”

  Nash stood and tapped the list. “I got time to wash-up and get some grub before I get started?”

  “Make it somethin’ you can eat as you go, Clay. There was over ten thousand in that strongbox.”

  Nash whistled.

  “One other thing. It was one of the new boxes, with the combination lock. It’s goin’ to give Jarvess a real headache trying to get it open. He won’t use dynamite and risk burning the paper money, so that’s the only time we’ve got on our side. It’s too damn heavy to move all over the countryside. My guess is he’ll get to his hole-in-the-wall and work on it. Which means they’ll likely stay together for a few days. Be nice if we could catch ’em all at once—gathered around that strongbox.”