Canyon of the Long Shadows Read online

  CANYON OF THE LONG SHADOWS

  By

  CARL DANE

  A Hawke & Carmody Western Novel

  Also by Carl Dane:

  Hawke and Carmody Western Novels

  Valley of the Lesser Evil

  Canyon of the Long Shadows

  Rage under the Red Sky

  Rapid Fire Reads (short books)

  Delta of the Dying Souls

  The Mountain of Slow Madness

  Copyright © 2018 Carl Dane

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Raging Bull Publishing

  www.ragingbullpublishing.com

  First edition

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To Cathy, Mark, and Carl.

  With love.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  When I told Judge Percival Weed that I had evidence he’d taken a bribe, he told me he was holding me in contempt and would put me in jail.

  I told Judge Weed that as I was the marshal and it was my jail, I would be damned if I’d check myself in.

  He tilted his head back and told me in the squeaky, clipped tone favored by snippy little fussbudgets everywhere that we had something of a dilemma, now don’t we?

  I assured him that we had nothing of the kind and grabbed a handful of his shirt, necktie and whatever else he was wearing underneath that robe and pulled him over the top of the bar where he’d set up court.

  In addition to a robe, the pretentious little peckerwood had actually brought a gavel with him when setting up an impromptu court in the Silver Spoon, a combination bar and bordello run by my sometime girlfriend, Elmira Adler. Bar-room courts are not unusual in the various ass ends of central Texas – they are, in fact, the norm, as most small towns didn’t have courthouses – but robes and gavels were a bit much, and I particularly objected to the gavel when he hit me on the shoulder with it.

  It stung, so I took it away and yanked him up to his full height of maybe five and a half feet and lifted him off the ground by half an inch or so. I’m not a particularly big man, a little over six feet and on the lean side, but I’d spent a decade as a prizefighter. In that line of work you learn about leverage and how to use your legs to lift an opponent off-balance.

  You also learn about how effective a weapon intimidation can be.

  “Judge Weed,” I said, “assuming that you are a real judge of some yet-to-be determined species, I have a question on which I would welcome a ruling.”

  He said nothing. I’m not sure he could. He was only able to gurgle a little – I was lifting him by a big handful of cloth in my right hand and was cutting off most of his air – and he did a panicky little toe-dance.

  “Do you see this gavel?” I held it with my left hand about two inches in front of his face and his eyes crossed as he looked at it.

  “Do you think it will hurt more going in or when the doctor pulls it out?”

  With that he began to sob and then he marched dutifully to his cell – and thus began my troubles with the entire judiciary of Texas, several of its politicians, a substantial portion of the state’s criminal class, and the considerable overlap among those groups.

  Chapter 2

  Let me back up a little.

  My name is Josiah Hawke and I’m the marshal in Shadow Valley, a dismal little hamlet that I must admit is not without its charms, including Elmira, but I’ll get to her in a minute. I was brought here about a year ago to find the killer of the former marshal, Billy Gannon.

  Gannon was my captain in the war. We were part of a Union detachment that specialized in what you might categorize as “special tactics” or “dirty tricks,” your point of view depending on whether you were doing them or having them done to you. After the regiment was mustered out in June of 1865, I returned to my life as a professor at a small Illinois college, and Billy turned to lawing.

  My educational career ended a month later when a pug with a traveling carnival goaded me into fighting him. I handled him pretty easily – I would imagine he regarded my sneak right hand, which I could land pretty much at will, as a dirty trick. He tried to gouge out my eye in retaliation.

  I took exception to that and beat him to death and left town one step ahead of the law. As do a lot of men technically categorized as outlaws, I found occasional work enforcing the law (the skill set is mostly interchangeable) and also put together a pretty good record as an itinerant bareknuckle prizefighter.

  I had lost contact with Billy for ten years after the war and was reunited with his corpse after Elmira contacted me. He’d told her to wire me if anything happened to him. Which it did. He caught four bullets to the head.

  It would take a very tough man to kill Billy Gannon.

  I found the man who did it, and he was tough, but I killed him anyway.

  His name was Purcell. He was a gunfighter, a pro as quick as a rattler and just as mean. He’d been nebulously connected to a network of shadowy creatures who tried to drive Elmira out of business so they could lay claim to the land in back of her place. The property was essentially a worthless expanse of brush, until whatever spider lay in the midst of the plot learned of the plans for a shiny new railroad right through the acreage.

  As I heaved the little man who had slithered into town and announced himself as a “special territorial magistrate” into my modest little iron-bar hotel, I wondered if I’d just sent the first faint vibration radiating toward the center of that web.

  Chapter 3

  Tom Carmody, my deputy, sat on the b
ench in front of the office and whittled.

  I didn’t know anyone outside of a rube character in a play or dime novel who actually sits for hours and whittles, but Carmody does. He’s from the hills of Eastern Tennessee and even though he now favors bowlers and vested suits he somehow makes them look like straw hats and overalls.

  He chews tobacco as well as whittles and leaves a hell of a mess everywhere, but he keeps saving my life, so I have no choice but to keep him around.

  “Shit, it’s hot in there,” Carmody said. It came out, sheee-it, it’s hot in thar. “But the little fucker won’t take off his robe.”

  “Really.”

  “Yup. That’s ‘cause when you gave him the stink-eye he pissed himself. Don’t want it to show. I noticed the puddle in the cell.”

  I sat down next to Carmody. There wasn’t a lot of room, as he’s about six-five and tends to sit splay-legged.

  He rubbed his wiry black beard, as is his wont when he has something on his mind. When he wants to make an intelligent point – which he is extraordinarily capable of doing, though not on a regular schedule – he generally thinks before he speaks. When he wants to get under my skin, he just blurts like a Gatling gun.

  “It occurs to me,” he said, “that we might not find an easy way out of this. You just threw a judge in jail and wasn’t too hospitable doing it.”

  “First off, I’m not entirely sure he’s a real judge. He waltzed in here claiming he’s a ‘territorial magistrate.’ That may very well be true. The state hands out titles like Easter candy, mostly to the donor class or people connected to them. Whether being a ‘territorial magistrate’ equates to being a real judge I’m not sure. I’ve never heard of a ‘territorial magistrate.’ But there are plenty of freelance judges – and marshals, for that matter – of what you might call dubious provenance.”

  Carmody sliced off another sliver of wood and held the stick up for inspection, as though he were contemplating his next chisel cut in a marble statue.

  “Kinda like us,” he said.

  “True enough.”

  Carmody and I had been duly appointed by the town council – at least we had a contract and got paid – but in actuality no one in town is quite sure who’s on the council or how they got elected or even how many members are supposed to constitute it. Elmira sort of inherited her seat from her late husband. There’s a sour-faced druggist named Miller who vaguely indicated that he regards himself as a councilman. And there are other councilmen who meet with Elmira in secret but won’t reveal their identity because they’re afraid of getting murdered by the same people who tried to kill me and Carmody.

  Elmira felt badly about keeping their names secret from me, but I assured her that if she gave her word to them she’d get no complaint from me for keeping it.

  If our political system in Shadow Valley seems haphazard, it is. But it’s not atypical in a town made up largely of drifters and people allergic by nature to laws and lawmakers.

  There is only one person in town that had any political ambition, and his name is Jefferson Gillis. He comes and goes but returned in a big way a week ago. He’s a self-styled political reformer who has a big mouth and a grand opinion of himself and probably emerged from the birth canal with an ulterior motive.

  I took an immediate dislike to him when I first met him last week, and determined that he very well might wind up as a guest in my little cell. I’d never had two people in there. Now, it would be cramped as well as damp.

  Gillis was apparently going to force the decision because he was walking down the street with seven men wearing sidearms.

  Chapter 4

  Gillis brought up the rear, marching to his own monologue as he intoned his unending list of grievances. He was perpetually aggrieved, as far as I could determine, and rarely stopped talking. The men accompanying him would occasionally grunt a yeah or a that’s right, but their hearts weren’t in it. They just wanted to hurt me and get it over with. While I didn’t recognize them, I knew their type: hard-eyed, down-on-their-luck drifters who hired themselves out as muscle.

  “…and you assaulted a legally-appointed magistrate.” He was drifting into earshot.

  “You and your cowboys stop right there,” I said.

  I’m old-school. Though I hear some people use the word “nowadays” to refer to anybody on the trail, when I was a kid, “cowboy” usually implied a rustler or petty criminal. That’s how I meant it, and I got a couple of glares from those who picked up my meaning.

  They did honor my command to stop, but not before they’d shuffled into a semi-circle around me and Carmody. We’d stepped into the street to greet them.

  Gillis, of course, just kept talking.

  “And I protest!” He drawled it out, ahhhhhhh pro-TEST, in an overly broad cadence. I happened to find out he grew up in New Jersey. He didn’t quite have the inflection down, although he did do a very convincing imitation of someone imitating a politician, maybe one from Texas, though the lilt suggested Louisiana or Arkansas.

  “I’m guessing your magistrate is some minor government functionary with a fancy title,” I said, “and you paid him to come down here to cook up a reason for you to grab Elmira Adler’s property.”

  “You are so typical,” Gillis said, “of the jackal pack always at the throat of someone seeking honest and fair representation. You, sir,” – it came out suh – “are despicable.”

  I took a moment and just looked at him. People who feed on drama are unnerved when their supply is cut off. Whenever possible I like to keep people off-balance, especially when they are hiding behind a gang of goons who appear to have imminent battery on their minds.

  Gillis was tall, carried a few extra pounds, and had a bulbous nose. I pegged him at about 40, although his hair was prematurely gray. He owned property at the edge of town, though he’d not been around for a year. Gillis owned some sort of cattle operation, I’m told, which keeps him in the eastern part of the state most of the time.

  Some of the girls at the Spoon told me they remembered Gillis, who had a habit of showing up every couple years or so and causing a commotion, and then disappearing as suddenly as he’d arrived. Gillis was somehow involved in the fringes of politics, in a murky, undefined way. He liked to make deals and speeches, and described himself as an advocate for justice. He also liked to pontificate in public about how the girls in the Spoon’s employ were exploited, but in private he enjoyed getting drunk, slapping them around, and when he really got cucumbered, talking like he was from New Jersey.

  Oddly, when I asked her, Elmira would only say that he meant well.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” Gillis asked, impatient. I’d thrown a wrench into his machinery. In Gillis’s world, when you publicly condemned a man he was supposed to get huffy and sputter a defense. He was itchy waiting for the echo that never came. The laws of his universe were malfunctioning, and he didn’t like it at all.

  So I stared at him a little longer while I tried to figure out what the game was.

  At present, the man’s motivation eluded me, but Shadow Valley was a place of half-truths and unspoken secrets. I suppose every place is like that, more or less.

  All I knew was that he’d ridden into town three days ago and claimed that according to town bylaws, the Silver Spoon was “unlawful” – his words – because the rules only allowed one drinking establishment.

  He further claimed that the present government of the town was “unlawful” – again, that word, which sounds like “illegal” but it’s not, hence a good way to rouse some indignation without having to be too specific – because we could not produce records of the vote.

  Well, he had a point. Shadow Valley, and probably hundreds of sorry little hamlets like it in this area, are barely more than shantytowns. Over the years, settlers had come and gone, setting up bylaws and ordinances that melted away as quickly as the previous wave of drifters.

  Back in the days when I was a teacher, I would expound on the structure of governmen
t. It sounded so damn tidy when I read it from the pages of a book. But in the decade or so I’ve spent alternately enforcing laws and running away from them, I’ve seen that in most parts of the West the laws are conflicting, varying among jurisdictions, muddled as to what jurisdiction actually holds authority, and pretty much like the rules of prizefighting – made up on the spot by the referee, and then pretty much nonexistent once the first punch is thrown.

  So in keeping with that spirit, I decided to throw it.

  It was a clean straight right hand to the chin of the cowboy nearest to me.

  He obligingly fell flat on his back, arms outspread, and I bent over him and took his pistol, handing it over my shoulder to Carmody.

  Chapter 5

  Gillis didn’t seem accustomed to violence. Shocked as he was, he actually couldn’t come up with a speech, which was an unexpected treat. He just stuttered a little. So I figured now was a good time to say my piece.

  “I asked about those ‘bylaws’ you keep quoting,” I said, “and they were drawn up twenty years ago by people who are no longer in this town and likely no longer on this earth.”

  “The law…the law…”

  “Come on, Gillis. Spit it out.”

  He made a conscious effort to compose himself and lectured me that the law is the law and stays the law until it’s changed.

  Carmody spoke up.

  “The doctrine of stare decisis,” he said. “Latin for ‘the decision stands.’”

  I didn’t want to turn away from the six goons who remained vertical, but I couldn’t help but shoot him a glance over my shoulder.

  “How do you know this stuff?

  For a guy who’d spent most of his life in the mountains jumping stumps and eating squirrels, Carmody had a stunning range of knowledge. Sometimes I’d play the upright piano in the Spoon and sneak in a modified version of Mozart or Beethoven – Carmody called them “cowpoked up” – and he’d usually be able to summon up the composer and title.

  “I ain’t no dummy,” he said. “Wasn’t no fancy professor and military officer like you, but I do some reading when I have a chance.”