Sheriff Moultrie and the Sulfur Springs Bandits (part 2)

Daniels had wanted to blow his top, the Sheriff could tell. Had they not been in the presence of so many witnesses he most certainly would have.

“The bank says the only thing missing was your amulet, Mr. Daniels,” Deke had informed him as the Sheriff looked on.

Daniels’ voice was tight. “Get it back” were the only words he was able to squeeze out before he snatched up his hat and shut the door a little too hard behind him on his way out.

The Sheriff took a moment to put his head in his hands. He was under no obligation to track down Daniels’ property, but he now had three murders to deal with. Gossip traveled faster than lawmen in the county, so Moultrie had not been the one to inform Connie of her cousin Olivia’s death. He’d been to the general store that morning, but Connie was nowhere to be seen.

Putting Daniels out of his mind, he turned his attention back to the old mining map that Deke had obtained from the county surveyor. It gave a fairly detailed picture of the canyon and if they ever had to go back there the Sheriff wanted to be ready.

“Someone to see you, Sheriff,” Deke said. Moultrie’s head snapped up from where he had been closely examining the map. He squinted at the figure in the doorway, who turned out to be Mr. Pendleton.

“Pardon my distraction; this map, well . . . how can I help you?” Given that all of his bank’s deposits had been returned, the Sheriff was unsure why the man was there.

Pendleton tugged at his collar before saying, “Actually, Sheriff Moultrie, I was hoping that I might be able to help you.”

He had overheard Daniels grousing about his amulet as the rancher had stomped his way over to the saloon in a fury. Pendleton, though known to nearly everyone in Bracton as a banker, had once been a professor of history at a small college in New England. It was owing to that background that several years earlier Cyrus Daniels had enlisted Mr. Pendleton’s help in examining an artifact.

“Mr. Daniels never told me how he came to have it, mind you,” Pendleton said. “He did, however, ask me not to mention it to anyone. Under the circumstances, however, I feel compelled to break my silence.”

The Sheriff leaned forward over the office’s single, hefty desk.

“And why is that?”

“It was a native amulet that he asked me to examine and research. I can’t imagine even Mr. Daniels would have more than one such item in his possession. So the stolen one now causing him so much distress must be the same one that I examined.”

“All right,” the Sheriff said. It was, perhaps, mildly interesting information, but he failed to see the helpfulness.

Deke piped up at that point. “Well, what do you mean ‘native amulet,’ Mr. Pendleton?”

The banker-historian briefly recounted the tale of “The Lost Amulet of Don Rodrigo de Valera.” The ruthless conquistador was reputed to have scoured the nearby country for treasure. When his expedition was unsuccessful he and his men contented themselves with plundering villages and pueblos for whatever meager wealth could be found. Before returning to Spain, Valera designed a garish amulet as a memento of his conquest.

“A native artisan was pressed into service to do the work,” Pendleton continued, “but what de Valera did not know was that the man was also a shaman. The legend says that the shaman cursed the amulet before giving it to the Spaniard.”

“What happened after that?” Deke asked, much more enthralled by the story than Moultrie would have liked.

“Well, the Spanish packed up their booty and rode off for Veracruz, but they were never seen again.”

“So . . .” the Sheriff started to say.

“And so,” Pendleton went on, reading the expression on Moultrie’s face as skepticism, “if the amulet has been the only thing taken so far, then it stands to reason that these robbers were looking for it specifically. That ought to narrow down the list of potential suspects, right?”

“I suppose it may. Is that all?”

“No, actually!”

Moultrie rolled his eyes as the banker retrieved something from his pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief.

“I don’t know if this will mean anything, but I found it the other day after Deke was finished cleaning up. It must be one of theirs.”

After Pendleton left, Deke gingerly pulled back the folds of the handkerchief to reveal a single spur. He held it up to the light that streamed in from the front window.

“Looks pretty ordinary to me,” the deputy said. As he turned it slightly, something caught the Sheriff’s eye.

“Let me have that,” Moultrie interjected. He walked over toward the window, confirming what he thought he saw and then held the spur up to his nose, taking a deep breath in.

“Sheriff, are you all right?”

“What do you see there?” he asked, holding the spur close to his deputy’s face.

“Looks yellow.”

“Smell it.”

Moultrie handed the spur back to Deke and the deputy took a whiff.

“Oof. Rotten eggs.”

“Exactly. Sulfur.” The Sheriff let the word hang in the air for a moment. “It’s caked on there pretty good and there’s only one place around here that a man could drag his spurs through stuff like that.”

Understanding dawned on Deke in a flash. “The sulfur springs up north!”

“You got it, Deke. Let’s gather up a posse and go get these guys.”

“Yessir, Sheriff!”

Deke only had to do a little cajoling, but within a couple of hours he and the Sheriff and half a dozen other men were saddled up and on their way north to the springs. A couple miles from their ultimate destination, they swung out to the west so they could approach from the patch of fir trees that dotted the nearby landscape.

Forming a firing line that faced east, they settled in behind some waist-high rocks that lined the trail that wound its way down out of the forested hills. A rude campsite was set up in the mouth of a cave, standing well within range of the Winchester carbines that the Sheriff had retrieved from the case in the back of the jail. Deke was a crack shot and the Sheriff was nearly as good, but the rest of the posse was made up of farmers and merchants whose proficiency with the weapons was an open question. If the plan went well, however, Moultrie reasoned that they wouldn’t need to find out the answer to that question.

The springs blocked any escape toward the north and the robbers’ horses—one of which the Sheriff recognized from his encounter at the canyon—were tied up between the campsite and the posse. The crooks would have to be crazy to try to run toward gunfire to retrieve their horses. The only options left were to try to flee on foot to the south, to scramble up the escarpment behind the cave to the east, or to surrender where they stood. The Sheriff was hoping the fugitives would take the last option. If they didn’t . . .

Moultrie looked down the line of men to his right and to his left. They were ready.

“Come out of that cave with your hands up!” the Sheriff bellowed. “This is Sheriff Moultrie. We have you surrounded.”

He waited a moment. The sound of the men cocking their carbines was the only thing that broke the silence. Moultrie was about to call out again and threaten to start sending men in when sounds began coming from somewhere back in the cave. It was the sound one might expect men who had been taken by surprise to make as they scrambled to pull on their trousers and rifled through their belongings, but there was something else, the Sheriff thought. It was almost like a low humming sound, but Moultrie knew that couldn’t be right.

Turning toward Deke, he started to say, “Do you hear—”

Before he could finish his question a figure emerged from the shadows of the cave and began walking toward them. It was the shape of a man, holding his hands in the air, but something seemed wrong about him. The man himself was enormous, like something the Sheriff had read about on circus handbills. The hands, however, seemed disproportionate to the body, as if they belonged to another man; the fingers were too long and thin for a man of that height and bulk.

The humming grew in Moultrie’s ears. He tried and failed to push the unnerving sound to the back of his consciousness. From his spot toward the other end of the line, Deke was calling out something, but the only part that the Sheriff could make out over the humming was the words “the same became mighty men which were of old.”

“Now get down on your knees and yell for your pard to come out too,” Deke shouted.

The gargantuan man started the motion of bending a knee, but then stopped. The humming in the Sheriff’s ears suddenly became too loud to ignore any more. It took all the willpower within him not to drop his hands from his weapon and cover his ears. Then, in one motion, the man thrust his hands forward and opened his mouth, letting loose a sound that the rest of the posse would later describe as “inhuman.” It was deafening, but mercifully short.

Afterward, the rumbling remained, but it was coming from up the hill, behind and above the posse. The Sheriff kept his gun trained on his target, but craned his neck around just in time to see several large boulders tumbling down the hill, snapping branches and whole trees like they were matchsticks.

“Run!” the Sheriff and Deke bellowed in unison. A few of the men dropped their guns, but all took off as fast as they could, stumbling, sliding, and rolling down the hill toward the campsite.

Before any of them reached the foot of the slope, shots rang out from the direction of the cave. Moultrie dropped prone and found his deputy at his side. They returned fire, but the shooter was too deep in the cave to be seen. The darkness gave him—or them—an advantage that would be hard to overcome until he emerged.

The rest of the posse remained in a state of confusion and failed to notice that the large man had closed the distance between them. The sound of hoofbeats racing toward the cave finally drew their attention.

“Take ‘em down!” Deke yelled above the din. The shots from the cave came faster than ever, faster than any of them had thought possible. The Sheriff’s eyes filled with tears as bits of sulfury dust flew up and bullets pocked the ground near where he lay. A flash of intense heat seemed to strike him in the hand, but he ignored it. He glanced up as the gunfire finally ceased for a moment, just in time to see a second man hoisting himself onto a horse next to his much larger compatriot. They spurred their horses with fury and began galloping off to the south.

Moultrie rose to one knee, levered a round into the chamber, and trained his sight on the fleeing bandits. The smaller man made the smaller target, but he was in the rear and, somewhat curiously, had not gotten up to full speed as quickly as the other. The Sheriff took a quick breath and let it out again then pulled the trigger.  It was, he thought, the shot of a lifetime, but to his dismay it only succeeded in shooting the man’s hat off his head.

As quick as the Sheriff was to load another round, he was not quite quick enough. He raised his gun again only to see the men disappear over the low hill that formed the edge of the basin in which the sulfur springs sat.

“Sheriff, come quick!” he heard from somewhere behind him.

Turning back toward the trees from which they had emerged mere moments before, he saw a group of men huddled together. They parted as he drew closer, revealing a grisly scene. There, half-covered by a boulder the size of a wagon, lay the lifeless corpse of Jared Parker.

Deke was the only one who could manage some words, saying, “We all ran for it.” He doffed his hat and bowed his head slightly. “He should have been able to get out of the way . . . Sheriff, are you bleeding?”

Moultrie looked down to see that, in fact, his right hand had been grazed during the shooting. He supposed that in the heat of the moment there had been no time to fret over it.

“Never mind that,” he said, pulling a scarf from his pocket and wrapping it around his hand. “We need to get a team of horses up here and move this thing. Deke, you can ride over to the Parker place and . . .”

The Sheriff’s voice trailed off, but Deke knew what he had meant.

Deke put his hand on the Sheriff’s shoulder and said, “I’ll take care of it, Sheriff. Don’t worry.”

Image by Adam Derewecki from Pixabay

“Looks like it’ll just be the two of us, Sheriff, but I don’t like it.”

Deke had been gone all day trying to round up some more men to go after the robbers. As he sat down across from the Sheriff, Moultrie raised an eyebrow as the deputy almost immediately reached for his favorite book. He leafed through the well-worn pages absentmindedly.

“Well now, I’d sure like to have help, but two against two seems like a fair fight if it comes down to it.”

The deputy looked up from his reading and squinted at the Sheriff. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

“If it’s just going to be us, then there’s no sense in sitting around here.”

“I ‘spose that’s right,” Deke said. “But let me read you somethin’ before we head out.”

Moultrie indulged him. Deke thumbed toward the middle of his tome then flipped a couple pages. He scanned down the page with his finger until he had found what he was looking for:

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor. . . . And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

“I sure wouldn’t mind one more fella to ride out with us, but the two of us are a good team. We’ll get these rascals, Sheriff. I’m sure we will.”

Moultrie gave his deputy a friendly clap on the back as they rose to strap on their gun belts and saddle up. Deke was much more often the optimist than the Sheriff could make sense of, but he supposed it balanced out his more pessimistic inclinations.

“I’ll be right there,” the Sheriff said, turning back into the office. Reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk, he retrieved the Lemat revolver that he had not yet been able to return to Timothy Hanson’s mother in Chicago. Tucking it in his belt, he followed Deke to the horses.

They returned to the sulfur springs, carefully avoiding the spot where Jared Parker had been killed, and picked up the trail of the bandits. Yet again, they had not made themselves hard to follow. About half a mile from the springs, however, the tracks split. Large, heavy hoofprints turned to the north while the other set led south.

“Which one for you, Deke?”

The deputy shook his head. “I don’t much care for the idea of splittin’ up . . .”

He reached for the canteen that hung from the back of his saddle and took down a few generous swallows of water.

“But I don’t see no way around it.”

They agreed that two shots fired in quick succession would be their signal of danger. The Sheriff turned north and Deke’s mount trotted off to the south.

Not more than a few minutes later the hoofprints ended at the hulking black heap of the corpse that had once been the horse ridden by the larger of the two robbers. Though it must have been one of the largest stallions the Sheriff had ever seen, it had already begun to look haggard and emaciated, covered as it was with vultures and a huge swarm of flies.

Moultrie succeeded in scattering the vultures by shouting and waving his arms, not wanting to fire a shot and risk Deke thinking he had raised an alarm. Aside from the places where the vultures had begun picking at his skin, the Sheriff detected no obvious signs of injury. The bandit, he concluded, must have ridden the horse to death in his haste to escape. If he was on foot he should be that much easier to apprehend.

The Sheriff hopped down from his horse and began searching the area for shoe prints. After a minute or two he located what appeared to be bare footprints that led further northward, but before he had time to think about the oddity of it, two shots rang out from somewhere behind him. He was back in his saddle in an instant, galloping south to answer Deke’s call.

He reined in his horse to a fast walk when he returned to the place where they had separated. Picking up the tandem trail of Deke’s horse and the robber’s he quickened his pace, listening intently for another pair of shots or any other sounds to tell him what was happening with his deputy. Spying movement in the low brush ahead, the Sheriff dug his heels into the horse’s sides and was quickly at a run. What he found was Deke’s horse, without his rider.

Moultrie scanned the immediate area, quickly determining that the deputy had not merely fallen from his horse. He lifted his eyes toward the southern horizon and was able to make out another rider in the distance. The horse was moving away from him quickly, but appeared to be somewhat slowed by a large burden strewn across its back. Shielding his eyes from the sun he squinted to see that the thing hanging from the back of the horse was a man’s body. It must be Deke, the Sheriff told himself. He secured the Lemat revolver in his belt, before urging his own horse onward at a breakneck pace.

He was making up ground quickly, but as he mounted the crest of a low, rounded hill, he saw that the man was about to disappear into the same small canyon where the Sheriff had gotten lost before. Recalling the old miner’s map of the area, he now knew that he could cut off the man’s escape if he hurried. Rather than follow him into the canyon he galloped round to the east.

His horse had barely come to a stop before Moultrie’s feet were on the ground. He didn’t bother finding a place to tie up his horse; there was no time if his plan was going to work. If his memory was as good as the map, then he was in the right place. That side of the canyon backed up against a red and weather-beaten mesa. At the top, the Sheriff would be in the perfect spot to intercept the rider and ambush him from above.

It wasn’t a terribly long climb, but it was straight up. Fortunately, the miner’s map had pointed out that there was a chimney-like notch in the side of the mesa. Moultrie made sure his gun belt was secure, placed his right foot on the right side of the narrow, dusty chute, and started upward.

It was easy at first. He had no trouble finding holds for his hands and feet. But about thirty feet from the top the notch grew wider, making it harder for the Sheriff to support himself. It quickly grew too wide for him to stretch all the way across and so he was forced to cling to one side. When one of his feet briefly slipped from its perch he looked down for the tiniest moment, and when he had regained his balance he instantly resolved to keep his eyes pointed toward the top until the ordeal was over.

The roots of a sturdy bush served as the final handholds that helped him pull himself over the edge. He rose to one knee to brush off some dust, but before he could lift his eyes he heard “Don’t move!”

The high-pitched voice came from no more than a few yards away and it sounded as if the man to whom it belonged should have been home abed, recovering from a cold. The Sheriff slowly raised his eyes to see, rather, three men. Deke, with a streak of blood that ran down his forehead, was held around the neck by the smaller of the two robbers. The man’s gangly arms looked hardly strong enough to hold up the revolver he had pointed at Deke’s head, let alone maintain a grip on the deputy. The man wore a menacing grimace and held his finger near the trigger of his weapon much too nervously for the Sheriff’s liking.

The other man loomed a step or two behind, towering over his partner in crime. Moultrie knew him at once from the freakish hands that hung low at his sides: it was the giant man from the shootout at the springs. He took half a step forward and a flash of light forced the Sheriff to blink. When he refocused his eyes he saw what had caught the sun’s reflection: it was Daniels’ amulet, strung around the giant’s neck (he recognized it from a photograph that Daniels said he had made “for insurance purposes”).

“Don’t move!” the man yelled again as the giant came up next to him.

The man’s hand was visibly shaking, but the Sheriff noticed that his finger was not actually on the trigger of his weapon. Perhaps, Moultrie thought, the man didn’t have the guts to kill when it was up close and personal.

“Take that gun off your hip and toss it over here. Do it slow!” the man continued.

Moultrie began to comply. As he did so, he tried to get a better look at the larger of Deke’s two captors. Stringy, silver hair hung loosely from under the man’s wide-brimmed hat. Even in full sunlight the man’s features were hard to make out, obscured as they were by his hair and the shade of his hat. The Sheriff could not make out the color of the man’s eyes, but his nose and mouth and chin protruded from behind the curtain of hair and shadow farther than they should have.

“Dump the bullets on the ground first.”

The Sheriff obeyed that seemingly unnecessary instruction and then tossed the gun. It landed near the feet of the giant, just as he had hoped. The hulking form bent only slightly to reach the gun, so long were his arms and hands, but Moultrie watched closely. The arms were covered in thick, black hair, but underneath it the skin seemed to be a mottled gray and white. The fingernails appeared much thicker and longer than any he had ever seen.

“Now get down on your belly and count to a thousand or your deputy here gets it. Slow.”

He went to one knee, keeping his hands at his side. As he began to bend his other knee, with one smooth motion, the Sheriff whipped the Lemat from where it was tucked at the back of his belt, leveled it at the giant, and fired three shots in rapid succession. He had done no more than aim for the center of the form that stood before him, yet he had, apparently, severed the chain upon which the amulet had hung.

Almost as soon as the amulet hit the dirt, the giant let loose with the same deafening roar from before. He began to reach down to pick up the amulet, but the Sheriff rose, taking a step forward, and trained his sights on the man’s head. He fired and his aim was nearly true. The large hat fell to the ground and Moultrie could see that his shot had grazed the giant’s head, mangling his ear. Dark, almost black blood poured from the side of his head, and the Sheriff locked eyes with the creature that he could no longer think of as merely human. The eyes were yellow and bloodshot, the pupils jagged and misshapen. Whatever those eyes were, the Sheriff could tell without a doubt that they were filled with rage.

Moultrie took another step forward, closing the distance between him and the giant to no more than a few paces, but too focused to realize that the other robber had let his gun drop to his side.

Deke, likewise, was too awestruck to move. “Sheriff, that thing . . .” he muttered.

The Sheriff flipped the lever on the end of the Lemat’s hammer, engaging the weapon’s secondary, smooth-bore barrel. He pointed the gun at the creature, pulled the trigger, and blasted a full load of buckshot into the demonically-deformed face.

The corpse fell to one side and then rolled, exposing a gaping, bloody cavity where, moments before, there had been a face. The other robber dropped to his hands and knees and began convulsing with dry heaves; it had clearly been more than a little while since he had eaten anything. Deke snatched the man’s gun and aimed it at him.

The Sheriff stepped forward to retrieve the amulet from near the creature’s outstretched hand. Crouching, he turned back toward Deke, holding up the amulet.

“All this trouble over this little thing?” he said, turning the amulet over in his hand. It was a truly garish piece of work, befitting a conquistador—and Cyrus Daniels. As he went to wind up the chain on which it hung, a piece fell to the ground. Picking it up, he realized that it was not a piece of the amulet, but rather a spent cartridge from the Lemat. It was then that he finally realized what was different about the ammunition: it was not lead, but silver.

“Deke, you ever seen something like this?”

Deke slid toward the Sheriff, keeping his gun pointed in their prisoner’s general direction. 

“No, I don’t believe I have, but it’s like I said before: something’ ain’t normal.”

“Heh. I suppose when you’re right, you’re right, Deke.” The Sheriff strode over toward the robber, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him to his feet. “But until Judge Jackson comes to town next week, I suppose Bracton’s very normal jail cell will have to do for this pretty normal lookin’ lackey.”